by Allan Kaster
Driving out of the shelter of the trees, Bai had the same scary floating sensation she’d felt when she’d stepped off the projection point of that jump platform into absolutely nothing at all. She parked the sled at the refinery and checked the tank in which she’d dumped Xtina Groza’s p-suit; she hadn’t been able to shake off the unsettling idea that it might have switched itself back on and reassembled itself, cut the camp’s comms, and rescued its owner. She felt a cool measure of relief when she saw that it was still there, exactly as she’d left it, and walked all the way around the trailer. No tracks she didn’t recognize, no movement behind the trailer’s lighted ports. She returned to the sled in three long bounds, had a brief conversation with her suit and stuffed a bunch of tethers in its utility pouch and unshipped a long handled wrench from the sled’s tool rack. Took a last look around and ankled up to the trailer’s lock and cycled through.
The woman, Xtina Groza, sat cross-legged on the floor at the far end of the trailer, the shroud wrapped around her like a cloak. Pale and angular, motionless as the avatar standing at the foot of the doctor thing’s couch. Moving only her eyes to look at Bai, saying, “Who are you? Where is this place?”
☼ ☼ ☼
After setting down the wrench, moving slowly and carefully to show that she was no threat, and unlocking and lifting off her helmet, Bai introduced herself, told Xtina Groza that this was a scale-harvesting camp on Oberon, explained that she had been inside a lifepod that had crash-landed a couple of hundred kilometers to the northeast.
“I found you, brought you here. The doctor thing was treating you, and I guess you woke up.”
The woman’s gaze lost focus for a second; then she shook her head. “I don’t remember any of that. I can’t even remember my name. I try, but it’s always just out of reach.”
Her voice was soft and husky, her accent stilted in the way people in old-time clips talked.
“It’s Xtina. Xtina Groza. Or at least, that’s the tag in your suit comms.”
The woman shook her head again. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. Oberon, though . . . I know Oberon. It’s one of the big moons of Uranus. But how did I get to Uranus?”
“You don’t know why you’re here?”
“I don’t even remember where I came from.”
She didn’t seem upset. Mildly bemused, maybe.
“You were in cold sleep a long time,” Bai said. “I suppose it could be a side effect.”
“Cold sleep? For how long?”
Bai told her suit to disperse, and said, as its components unlocked and threw themselves to their niches beside the lock, “I’ll fetch some tea and tell you everything I know. But I’m afraid that I don’t know very much.”
They sat cross-legged on the soft red alife moss that carpeted the trailer’s floor, drinking licorice tea (“I didn’t know I liked this,” Xtina said) while Bai explained about the lifepod’s crash-landing, how she’d found Xtina being walked through the umbrella-tree forest, asleep inside her pressure suit, how the suit had tried to ambush her.
“I think it thought I might be an enemy of yours. Or maybe it saw me as a source of power and consumables. It was walking you toward a refuge, but I don’t think it had enough zap to make it.”
“But you’re not my enemy,” Xtina said.
Bai wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question. She said, “It wasn’t you. It was your suit. You were asleep. You’d been asleep a long time. I think for around a century.”
Xtina showed no surprise. Taking a sip from her bulb of tea, she said, “Are you sure?”
Bai told her that her lifepod and p-suit were antiques, explained about the biochemical markers the doctor thing had found. Hesitated for a moment, torn between prudence and curiosity, then said, “It also found that you have implants. It seems that you were a soldier. Or some kind of combatant, anyway. Involved in the Quiet War.”
Another pause, another sip of tea. Xtina said at last, “I remember the Quiet War. I remember that the Three Powers Authority won.”
“They did, for a little while. And then we regained our independence.”
Another pause. “Well, I don’t remember that. It was a hundred years ago?”
“A little over.”
“And I came out here. To Uranus. Do you know why?”
“Have you heard of the Free Outers?”
“Is that what the people living here call themselves?”
“We came later. The Free Outers were what I guess you could call political refugees. They escaped from the Three Powers Authority during the Quiet War, stayed here a little while, moved further out.”
“You think I might be one? A Free Outer?”
“I was wondering if you came here because you wanted to join them,” Bai said.
If she’d guessed right, it would prove to her mother that her so-called fantasies could sometimes be useful.
But Xtina apologized again, saying, “I wish I could tell you it meant something to me. I wish I knew more. It’s strange. I suppose I should be confused, or upset. Or angry. Instead it doesn’t seem to matter.”
Her bony face was hard to read, but she did seem to be amazingly calm. Stoic. If Bai had woken up with no idea of who she was, where she was or why, when she was, she would have lost her mind.
“The doctor thing gave you all kinds of drugs,” Bai said.
“Perhaps this doctor thing could give me something that would help me remember who I am.”
“Do you remember what happened when you woke up?”
“I thought I was dead. I was wrapped tight inside this blanket, no light, no sound . . . And when I got free of it, I had no idea where I was. Who I was.”
“So the doctor thing fell over, and then you woke up.”
“I suppose so.”
“You don’t remember doing anything to it?”
“Do you think I did? Because I’m a soldier?”
“I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” Bai said cautiously, pierced by a sudden sharpness in Xtina Groza’s gaze.
She was wondering if the woman was faking her amnesia. Didn’t captured soldiers refuse to give up any information but their name and rank? Maybe she was pretending to have lost her memory so that she didn’t have to reveal her mission. And she definitely wasn’t as vulnerable and confused as she seemed to be: after she’d woken from her induced coma, she’d managed to shut down the doctor thing and futz the comms, which Bai’s suit had been trying to access ever since she’d stepped into the trailer, so far without any success.
“You and me both,” Xtina said. She had finished her tea, was rhythmically squeezing the bulb in one hand, holding the shroud closed at her throat with the other. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself? Where you live and how you live. This future I’ve somehow ended up in.”
She was trying to move the conversation away from herself, but Bai went with it. The peacers would be here in little under seven hours. By then, the soporific Bai’s suit had manufactured, a little gel capsule Bai had sneaked into Xtina’s bulb of tea, should have done its work. All she had to do was keep the woman talking, keep her calm, let her know she had nothing to fear, until she fell asleep.
She explained that there were just ten thousand people in the Uranus system, most of them living on Titania. She talked about Fairyland, how the city had been built by machines before people arrived, how there were many cities and settlements like it scattered across the solar system, some still completely empty, built during the wave of expansion in the heady decades of optimism and confidence that had followed the end of the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems by the Three Powers Authority, and reconciliation between Earth and the Outers. She told Xtina about all the places she wanted to visit, and Xtina said she knew some of the names but didn’t remember if she’d ever visited them, she didn’t even remember where she’d been living before she came here.
“If you want to leave,” she said, “why not just get on a ship and go?”
“Is that what you did?”
“I know it is what young people used to do. Set out on a wanderjahr. See other worlds, meet different people. Something else I didn’t know I knew until I thought about it. You don’t do that, anymore?”
“It isn’t that easy. In my clan, everyone shares credit and karma, and everyone has a say in how we use it.”
“If you really wanted to travel to other worlds, I think you’d find a way.”
“I’m going to, I really am. I’ve already been to Miranda—that’s one of the other moons? And now I’m working here, on Oberon. It wasn’t exactly my idea, but still.”
“So it was really your clan’s idea.”
“Sort of,” Bai said. No point mentioning her mother; it would only complicate things.
“And what kind of work are you doing here, for your clan?”
“Harvesting umbrella-tree scales. I guess you don’t know what they are, umbrella trees. They were developed after the war. They’re a kind of vacuum organism.”
“I know about vacuum organisms.”
“We have a big forest of umbrella trees here. They extract metals and rare earths from the crust, store them in scales that grow on their stems. I look after the machines that harvest and process scales that the trees have shed,” Bai said, and explained that her clan maintained the umbrella-tree forest for the same reason that other clans were running a borehole project to tap the residual warmth locked in the moon’s core, or administering the little spaceport that no one but the occasional outsystem tourist used.
“We have to have a presence on Oberon if we want a say in future settlement and development. Otherwise, the Gartens, that’s the largest clan in the system, they’d claim it as their own. They’ve built a big garden at the North Pole, and now they’re roofing over a chasm in the South Pole, planning to build another garden there. They like to plan ahead,” Bai said. “In twenty years the sun will be above the South Pole, and the North Pole, where they are now, will be in darkness. This forest too. My clan are discussing whether they should start planting a new one in the south. So why I’m here, it’s just politics. A silly game.”
Her mouth was dry, and she took a sip of cold tea. She’d done most of the talking, and Xtina still didn’t look the least bit sleepy, saying that she remembered that the Uranus system was tipped at right angles to the plane of its orbit, so the north poles of the planet and its moons were pointed toward the sun for half its orbital period, the south poles for the other half.
“And it takes eighty-four years to complete one orbit,” she said. “I didn’t know I knew that until I thought about it. Isn’t that strange? I wonder what else I know. Do you have a ship here?”
“Just a couple of hoppers.”
“I mean a real ship. What about these rivals of yours? The Gartens.”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. They have to bring in construction materials they can’t make here.”
“Ships that can only travel between moons? Or ships that can travel elsewhere?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Bai felt the chasm yawning at her feet again. Xtina couldn’t possibly know about the peacer ship. Could she? And why wasn’t the soporific working? It should have put her under by now.
“You want to travel. Maybe I can help you,” Xtina said. “Take you on a wanderjahr.”
“By stealing a ship?”
“From your rivals. Why not? It would be fun. And a good way of repaying you for saving my life.”
“Even if we could, the peacers would catch us.”
“Peacers as in peace police? Don’t worry about them. I suppose you put my suit in a safe place. In case it attacked you again. I couldn’t find it in this little habitat, so it must be outside.”
Xtina had shed her benign vagueness. She was energized, fully in control of the conversation.
Bai said, “I’m not going to help you steal a ship.”
“I can take you wherever you want to go. All you have to do is fetch my pressure suit.”
Bai met Xtina’s blue gaze, said, “I don’t think so.”
She’d stood up to her mother many times. This was a lot harder.
“If you won’t help me,” the woman said, “maybe I’ll take your suit. See if I can remember how to fly a hopper. How hard can it be, finding the north pole of this little moon?”
“That’s enough,” someone else said.
It was the avatar.
Saying, when Bai and Xtina turned to look at it, “You locked me out, but you didn’t find the back door.”
“Who am I talking to?” Xtina said, seemingly unperturbed.
“Wen Phoenix Minnot. Bai’s mother,” the avatar said, and swiveled neatly and with one bound reached the doctor thing at the other end of the couch, snatched something from it. A needle, flashing in its gripping claw.
“Wait,” Bai said. As far as she was concerned, the comms were still down. “I can handle this.”
“I took back control only a couple of minutes ago,” Wen said, “but I heard enough to know that you can’t.”
The avatar took a bounding step toward Bai and Xtina, and Xtina pushed up and shouldered into it, grabbing the claw that held the needle and flipping up and over as they shot backward, wrapping her legs around the avatar’s waist, twisting its head back and forth. They struck the far wall and rebounded, the avatar’s head came free with a sharp pop, trailing a short spine of gear, and Xtina kicked the rest of it away and caught a wall bracket and hung there.
“I didn’t know I could do that,” she said. “But the body remembers.”
Then she flung herself at Bai.
☼ ☼ ☼
Bai woke three hours later, dry-mouthed and headachy. The avatar’s decapitated body sprawled on red moss a little way from her. There was no sign of its head, or of Bai’s suit. When she looked out of a port, she saw that one of the hoppers was gone, too.
The comms were still down. Truly down; Xtina had locked the back door Wen had used, the backdoor Bai knew nothing about. No way of raising help, or trying to warn Lindy Aguilar Garten. She fetched tea and a patch to ease the after-effects of the tranquillizer Xtina had injected into her, and waited for the peacers to arrive.
☼ ☼ ☼
Xtina Groza expertly finessed her disappearance. An antique but potent worm took down traffic control across the Uranus system; by the time everything was back up, the ship she’d stolen from the Gartens’ camp was long gone. It turned up twenty-one weeks later, with a fake registration and a wiped mind, on the landing field of Harper’s Hope, Europa, but there was no trace of Xtina, no clue as to why she had gone there or where she had gone afterward.
It wasn’t even clear if Xtina Groza had ever been her real name. There were no records of her in any city or settlement in the Saturn and Jupiter systems, no familial matches to her genome in the gene libraries, and other lines of enquiry likewise dead-ended. Xtina’s pressure suit turned out to be as dumb as a bag of rocks. Bai was pretty sure that it hadn’t been walking Xtina toward that shelter, and hadn’t tried to ambush her either. No, Xtina’s implants and the mesh woven through her musculature had done all that, working her sleeping body like a puppet. As for the lifepod, it had belonged originally to a cargo ship owned by a collective in Paris, Dione, damaged in the Quiet War, and cut up in an orbital graveyard around Saturn’s moon Rhea. The lifepod had been appropriated by the Three Powers Alliance, but there was no record of what had happened to it after that, and any useful information it might have possessed was lost beyond any hope of retrieval. It hadn’t simply shut itself down—its core and subsystems had been consumed by nanites, turned to a silky powder of plastics and metal.
It was the kind of action a military AI might take if it believed that it was about to fall into enemy hands, supporting Bai’s idea that Xtina Groza had been some kind of soldier, but although Bai interviewed more than two dozen surviving members of the resistance, none of them remembered Xtina Groza, and she failed to
find so much as a passing mention of a clandestine mission to Uranus in the official and unofficial histories of the war. And then there was the worm Xtina had used to futz traffic control, which turned out to be very similar to worms deployed by the Pacific Union against the transport, sewage, energy and environmental systems of several cities in the Saturn system. Outer rebels could have isolated it and redeployed it against their oppressors, but Bai knew that she had to try to chase down the other possibility.
She didn’t get very far. The reconciliation office in the PacCom’s embassy in Paris, Dione, couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions, and when she reached out directly to the Ministry of Defense in Beijing, she was told that the pertinent records were still sealed, but the case would remain active and she would be contacted if any new information came to light. As if it ever would. After all her research and patient detective work, she still didn’t know why Xtina Groza had ended up at Uranus, what she was, who she had been working for.
By then, Bai had spent two years searching for clues about Xtina’s identity, travelling amongst the moons of the Saturn and Jupiter systems, taking work wherever she could find it or relying on the kindness of strangers. She didn’t manage to wrangle trips to Mars or Earth, but there were more than enough wonders in the asteroid belt and the Outer system, an inexhaustible variety of people. She visited Paris, Dione, and Xamba, Rhea, venerable cities with proud histories of resistance during the war and occupation, and Akti, Enceladus, which stepped down the steep, terraced side of Damascus Sulcus and gave access to the inner sea and the tweaked merpeople who lived there, claiming to be the only true inhabitants of the little moon. She made the obligatory pilgrimage to her clan’s Firsthome on Dione too, and rode a yacht across Saturn’s rings, and on Titan trekked through a range of cryovolcanoes to a spent caldera that contained an ancient garden designed by the legendary gene wizard Avernus. She worked on a kelp farm suspended in Europa’s subsurface ocean, spent half a year on Ceres helping to plant a forest around a small briny sea in a habitat that snaked along the bottom of a tented canyon, hitched a ride on a freighter that on a long swing through the asteroid belt called on the Realm of a Hundred Blooms, Ymir, Longreach, and 20897Ballard, otherwise known as Concentration City.