He leaned forward, gesturing with his fork. I leaned back. He took the hint.
“It’s about the previous generation,” he said. “Our parents’ generation.”
“Oh,” I said. “Old people.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Nobody else is interested in it. But there must be stories to tell. Think about it, four hundred years! Cities being built and destroyed! Intrigues, affairs, deals! Secrets! Their past before they took ship!”
“Yes,” I said, “but who would read it?”
“The next generation,” he said. “The one after us.”
I leaned back again, this time for a different reason.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “The old people will be, like, legendary, and we’ll—”
“We’ll just be boring parents. Exactly.”
“So how much have you written?”
“I’ve done a lot of research,” he said. “It’s not easy. I think, well, to be honest I’d have to have all my faculties before actually, you know, writing about—”
I confess I laughed. He looked taken aback.
“You could write about them from the outside,” I said. “Don’t worry about their inner life, for now.”
He blinked. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Thanks.”
But I don’t think he has done anything about it. He showed me around the town and helped me to find a place to stay. I met him at a few parties, and sometimes, as now, in the same cafe.
“Morning,” he said, this morning. He was writing.
I sat down with my pot of coffee and plate of berrybread. Grant absently helped himself to a chunk of the latter and went back to tapping the table. Naked people were doing weird stuff on the screen. I’d finished my first cup before he stopped.
“Working on your novel?” I asked.
“Oh, no.” He waved away the idea. “I’m writing up a habitat proposal. For IC413.”
“Ambitious,” I said. “A low number rock.”
The ship radar has been busy the past few months. Kuiper-belt and asteroid-belt objects are now up in the thousands. Most of the early — thus large and/or near — ones have been tabbed.
“It’s more than a rock,” Grant said. “It’s got everything. Metals, volatiles, carbon…”
“And nobody’s tabbed it?”
He gave me an almost adult look. “It’s not AB, it’s 1C.”
“All the same…”
“It’s a waterworld moon, if you can’t be bothered to look it up. A very small one.”
“No wonder it’s unclaimed.”
“It could become a resort. That’s my proposal.”
“A resort? It’ll be decades before anyone can afford a resort.”
“Yes,” he said, “but think about what this could offer them when they do. It’s a long-term investment.”
“In what? A place to watch algae patches from orbit?”
“Access to the waterworld,” he said. “Build a skyhook down. Sailing, swimming…”
“Swimming? In ten gravities?”
“All right then, surfing. Extreme sports.”
I just snorted. “Drowning is extreme, yes!” I was a little disappointed in him. I’d been toying with the idea of asking him on to my team, though I was sure he intended to found his own. I’ve no intention of going near a gravity well, let alone building a business out of lowering people into one, and the second-deepest in the system at that. I was telling him all this at perhaps unnecessary length and with uncalled-for vehemence when an unusual irritating chime came from the wall screen. Forty-Five Free-Fall Love Positions, or whatever the morning programme was, vanished and the World Service Announcement screen came up. Last time I’d seen that, and heard the chime, was when the news about the electromagnetic spectrum sources came through. I felt a pang in my belly.
Seeing the introduction didn’t make it go away: all about how the probes en route can send back pictures which — because they’re so far apart — can be combined and processed and jiggered with to form an image like what you’d get from an enormous telescope. “Let go my hand,” Grant said. “Sorry,” I said. He sucked his knuckles. Then the first picture came up, of a blue hemisphere whorled with white clouds. We just had time to catch breath when the second came up, and stayed. Strip the cloud layer, enhance, and there it is: a hemisphere almost filled with land.
“Wow,” said Grant. “A supercontinent!”
“Not quite,” I pointed out. “Look, the top half, you can see it’s breaking up.” I counted. “Six chunks. Island continents.”
“Yes, yes,” Grant said. I could hear he was still sore about his fingers. “The southern one on its own is a supercontinent. And the others are so close that a bird could fly across the gaps.”
I leaned back, smiling. “Someday there might be birds. Maybe we should give it to the crows.”
Grant was still staring at the screen. People were shouting and speculating. I was too entranced even to pull out my slate. The brown and green of continents, divided by the narrow blue channels and surrounded by the wide blue sea.
“Green,” Grant said. “Lots of it. Inland.”
“That’s a lot of algae,” I said.
He stared at me. “You get algae mats on oceans, not on land. We’re looking at vegetation. We’re looking at plants!”
It was then that I saw what I was looking at: a rocky terrestrial with a multicellular biosphere, the first in fourteen thousand years.
“Another Earth,” Grant breathed.
I struggled to place the word, then remembered. It’s an archaic name for the Moon’s primary.
“Oh,” I said.
Horrocks Mathematical had a gene complex that processed iron molecules in his head. It lined them up in a delicate tracery that intercepted electromagnetic waves and transmitted electrical currents to his occipital lobes, where they stimulated neurons that formed images in his visual system. The gene complex was activated at puberty and the resulting structure reached maturity several years afterwards. It was not considered suitable for children and adolescents. It was called television.
He also had natural neural connections formed out of experience, like everyone else. His experiences, also like everyone else’s, were unique. Something in that background of experience — it could have been his studies of biology, his fascination with terrestrial planets, his skills at habitat construction, his gambler’s eye on the markets, or all of them together or something altogether else — was bugging him. Whenever he looked at a representation of the signals from the rocky world, he felt a sensation in his head akin to an itch, or to an incipient sneeze, or to the feeling that you have forgotten or overlooked something vital and can’t for the life of you imagine what.
6 — The Queen of Heaven’s Daughters
The University Museum was a tall cylindrical structure, ringed within by galleries and bristled without by tubes of wood and ceramic that regulated the humidity of its air circulation. Inside, the drip and sigh of this great battery of devices merged to a single vast whisper like a giant librarian’s hush. The air was clean and clear, scented of timber and water, and carried the merest whiff of the green algae that flourished under the runoffs of the pipes.
Darvin paced along the Gallery of the Southern Rule, glancing at the treasures of leatherwork and metalwork, of chiselled stone and hammered steel on display. The single great continent south of the equator, on the other side of the Middle Channel’s hot, stormy, narrow sea, had laid the basis for an antiquity and continuity of civilization denied by a more fragmented geography to the reaches and realms of the north. No Long Night — and no Dawn Age, either — had interrupted its protracted and undivided day. Nature itself seemed grander and older there. Gigantic predators, similar to the long-extinct monsters whose log-sized, stone-soaked bones sometimes weathered out of the north’s ravines, still haunted its uplands, and preyed on horizon-darkening, earth-shaking herds of likewise gargantuan grazers, likewise long gone elsewhere.