Minla's Flowers

'Good luck. Try laying a hand on me, and see how far it gets you. My ship's listening in on this conversation. It can put proctors into this room in a matter of seconds.'

'And the moon, Merlin? Do you have an excuse for the error that cost us so dearly?'

'I don't know. Possibly. That's why I'm going back to Lecythus. There are still people on the surface - Regressives, allies, I don't care. And people you abandoned in orbit, as well.'

'They'll all die. You said it yourself.'

He raised a finger. 'If they don't leave. But maybe there's a way. Again, I should have seen it sooner. But that's me all the way. I take a long time to put the pieces together, but I get there in the end. Just like Dowitcher, the man who gave your father the whetstone.'

'It was just a stone.'

'So you said. In fact, it was a vital clue to the nature of your world. It took spring tides and neap tides to lay down those patterns. But you said it yourself: Lecythus doesn't have spring tides and neap tides. Not any more, at least.'

'I'm sure this means something to you.'

'Something happened to your moon, Minla. When that whetstone formed, your moon was raising tides on Lecythus. When the moon and Calliope were tugging on your seas in the same direction, you got a spring tide. When they were balancing each other, you got a neap tide. Hence the patterning on the whetstone. But now the tides are the same from day to day. Calliope's still there, so that only leaves the moon. It isn't exerting the same gravitational pull it used to. Like you told me, the surface gravity is much lower than you'd expect. Oh, it weighs something - but nowhere near as much as it should, based on its size and appearance. If you could skip forward a few hundred million years and examine a piece of whetstone laid down now, you'd probably find very faint variations in sediment thickness. But whatever the effect is now, it must be insignificant compared to the time when your whetstone was formed. Yet the moon's still there, in what appears to be the same orbit. So what's happened?'

'You tell me, Merlin.'

'I don't think it's a moon any more. I think the original moon got ripped to pieces to make your armoured sky. I don't know how much of the original mass was used for that, but I'm guessing it was quite a significant fraction. The question is, what happened to the remains?'

'I'm sure you have a theory.'

'I think they made a fake moon out of the leftovers. It sits there in your sky, it orbits Lecythus, but it doesn't pull on your seas the way the old one used to. It has gravity, but it's not enough to affect the oceans to the same degree. And you're right: it's much less dense than I expected. I really should have paid more attention. Maybe if I did I could have spared Lecythus all this bloodshed.'

'And now you understand everything?'

'I understand that the moon's new. It's not been sitting there long enough to soak up billions of years of particles from the solar wind. That's why you didn't find the helium you were expecting.'

'So what is it?'

'That's what I'm keen to find out. The thing is, I know what Dowitcher was thinking now. He knew that wasn't a real moon. Which begs the question: what's inside it? And could it make a difference to the survivors you left behind?'

'Hiding inside a shell won't help them,' Minla said. 'You already told us we'd achieve nothing by digging tunnels into Lecythus.'

'I'm not thinking about hiding. I'm thinking about moving. What if the moon's an escape vehicle? An Exodus Ark big enough to take the entire population?'

'You have no evidence.'

'I have this.' With that, Merlin produced one of Minla's old picture books. Seventy years had aged its pages to a brittle yellow, dimming the vibrancy of the old inks. But the linework in the illustrations was still clear enough. Merlin held the book open at a particular page, letting Minla look at it. 'Your people had a memory of arriving on Lecythus in a moon-sized ship,' he said. 'Maybe that was true. Equally, maybe it was a case of muddling one thing with another. I'm wondering if the thing you were meant to remember was not that you came by moon, but that you could leave by one.'

Minla stared at the picture. For a moment, like a breeze on a summer's day, Merlin felt a wave of almost unbearable sadness pass through the room. It was as if the picture had transported her back to her childhood, before she had set her life on the trajectory that, seventy years later, would bring it to this bed, this soundproofed room, the shameful survival of this one ship. The last time she had looked at the picture, everything had been possible, all life's opportunities open to her. She'd been the daughter of a powerful and respected man, with influence and wisdom at her fingertips. And yet from all the choices presented to her, she had selected this one dark path, and followed it to its conclusion.

'Even if it is a ship,' she said softly, 'you'll never get them all aboard.'

'I'll die trying.'

'And us? We get abandoned to our fates?'

Merlin smiled: he'd been expecting the question. 'There are twelve hundred people on this ship, some of them children. They weren't all party to your schemes, so they don't all deserve to die when you meet the Huskers. That's why I'm leaving behind weapons and a detachment of proctors to show you how to install and use them.'

For the first time since his arrival in the room, Minla spoke like a leader again. 'Will they make a difference?'

'They'll give your ship a fighting chance. That's the best I can offer.'

'Then we'll take what we're given.'

'I'm sorry it came to this. I played a part in what you became, of that I've no doubt. But I didn't make you a monster.'

'No,' she said. 'I'll at least take credit for myself, and for the fact that I saved twelve hundred of my people. If it took a monster to do that, doesn't that mean we sometimes need monsters?'

'Maybe we do. But that doesn't mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.' Gently, as if bestowing a gift, Merlin placed the picture book on Minla's recumbent form. 'I'm afraid I have to go now. There won't be much time when I get back to Lecythus.'

'Please,' she said. 'Not like this. Not this way.'

'This is how it ends,' he said, before turning from her bed and walking to the exit. 'Goodbye, Minla.'

Twenty minutes later he was in the Waynet, racing back to Lecythus.

There's a lot to tell, and one day I'll get around to writing it up properly. For now it's enough to say that I was right to trust my instincts about the moon. I just wish I'd put the clues together sooner than I did. Perhaps then Minla would never have had to commit her crimes.

I didn't save as many as I'd have wished, but I did save some of the people Minla left behind to die. I suppose that has to count for something. It was close, but if there's one thing to be said for Waymaker-level technology, it's that it's almost childishly easy to use. They were like babies with the toys of the gods. They left that moon there for a good reason, and while it was necessary for them to camouflage it - it had to be capable of fooling the Huskers, or whoever they built that sky to hide from - the moon itself was obligingly easy to break into, once our purpose became clear. And once it started moving, once its great engines came online after tens of thousands of years of quiet dormancy, no force in the universe could have held it back. I shadowed the fleeing moon long enough to establish that it was headed into a sector that appeared to be free of Husker activity, at least for now. It'll be touch and go for a few centuries, but with force and wisdom on their side, I think they'll make it.

I'm in the Waynet now, riding the flow away from Calliope. The syrinx still works, much to my relief. For a while I considered riding the contraflow, back towards that lone Exodus Ark. By the time I reached them they'd have been only days away from the encounter. But my presence wouldn't have made a decisive difference to their chances of surviving the Huskers, and I couldn't have expected much of a warm welcome.