The angle of her helmet, half turned toward George, was growing uncomfortable. “George,” she said sharply, “I have to straighten my neck. See for yourself.”
No response. It occurred to her that George might want to avoid defending his actions, yet wish quietly to listen to whatever she might say. In which case he could not adjust her helmet without betraying himself.
Yarrow arched her neck within its rigid confines, seeking the most comfortable position. Settling herself as best she could, she closed her eyes; then opened them a second later. The image came to her of George, sensing her slowed respiration through the Onboard, leaning over her helmet, looking in upon her sleeping face. She sought to opaque the faceplate, but the system remained unresponsive.
Yarrow looked at the screens before her. They each displayed contiguous views of the starfield, like large leaded windows looking upon space. The craft, Yarrow guessed, had emerged from Neptune’s umbra: an almost imperceptible quality of the blackness suggested that the scattered dust of Greater Neptune was catching the Sun’s dim light.
Seven hours to the Teardrop, during which Yarrow now had more to think about than she had expected. Unable to turn away from the gritty sky, she closed her eyes. She, at least, knew its color: one step up from black.
She woke to the faint vibrations of the engine charging up, a hum she took several seconds to recognize. Evidently the immobilized clensuit conducted sound better, faint compensation for her disabled radio.
Her helmet was facing forward, having evidently been adjusted while she slept. Yarrow could imagine George waiting until she was deeply asleep before carrying out the furtive act: violation posing as solicitude.
The Dragon’s Teardrop hung before her: a dim chip, tear-shaped only when seen from a different angle, bereft of detail in the natural light. An enhanced view, such as it would appear by the sunlight of Earthspace, would show a dust-burnished iceberg, darker on its leading edge as it swung, tidally locked, through High Neptune Orbit. George liked enhanced views; the dimness of Greater Neptune distressed him, perhaps because he had not lived through the Centaur s long retreat from Sol.
Yaw engines hissed briefly and the Teardrop began to drift toward starboard. Yarrow watched the stars slide by, then felt a compensating series of hisses as the image steadied. No warning was spoken as the dust engine fired, slowing the craft’s backward approach. George evidently knew that she was awake, whether he acknowledged monitoring her or not.
“You can’t complete the mission alone,” she remarked. “You haven’t trained as long as I have. And your hand-eye coordination has never really come back.”
No reply. Yarrow listened attentively as the engines sprayed and the ship slowed, then felt the resonant clang of the duster connecting with the docking collar. Anchored deep in the Teardrop’s ice, the collar was their landing pad and their base, the single installation on a chunk of ice measuring a quarter of a cubic kilometer. Held fast like Yarrow herself, the ship was at rest.
George seemed resolved to treat her like a statue, a prisoner in a clensuit-sized cell. She could feel him moving about, trying not to cross into her line of vision. Once he brushed against her arm, and drew quickly away.
Yarrow waited for the faint shudder of the airlock cycling. It took longer than it should—was George calling for instructions?—but came at last, clangorous through the rigid suit. George would now be negotiating his way along handholds to the comet’s surface, and Yarrow was alone in the craft.
“I know you’re listening,” she said. “George doesn’t suspect your existence, but I know.”
There was no reply. Yarrow settled herself more comfortably, relaxed now that she knew no eyes gazed upon her, and spoke thoughtfully.
“You had him enter that order to make him feel complicit, didn’t you? Or no—to make him feel empowered. It wouldn’t do for him to realize that the ship can be controlled remotely.”
The unanswering silence did not trouble her. “Did you arrange to place a Chill on the mission? I imagine they must be good risks: loyal to mission objectives, unembittered by the past decade’s disappointment, politically ignorant. They must be well dispersed about Greater Neptune by now.
“I don’t suppose you could free my hands for a minute, so I could straighten the kink in my right wrist? Didn’t think so. It wouldn’t do to prove yourself to me, in case I actually do retain doubts. And anyway, you might not have such fine control over my suit; likelier it’s all or nothing.” She sucked on her food tube, which yielded up a flavored paste called apricot. “This stuff is awful. There were two pirogi in the hamper, and I bet George ate both of them. The rewards of political compliance.”
The stars before her drifted at a steady but non-periodic pace. Perturbed by repeated pushoffs, the comet now tumbled erratically, precessing like a wobbling top. Eventually, she knew, Neptune would swing into view, as well as the Sun, the Centaur (you had to look for it), and waxing Triton. George always looked pained when he saw the Sun, as though it had left him. “You’re looking in the wrong direction,” she told him once.
“There it is,” she said. A blue limb, darker than a hue should be and yet carry such richness, glided slowly along the screen’s right edge, disappearing halfway down. Yarrow began counting seconds, and reached 1187 before Neptune reappeared, a slightly broader slice than before. Her helmet monitor gave the same elapsed period, but she still didn’t trust it.
Why make so much of fragmentary blue? The line was from a poem she had had to learn, taught by an old fool who would recite favored bits at his sullen students. The poem’s meaning (it had at least been short) had something to do with the blue of the heavens being more real than the various blues of Earthly things, and so what? After a minute the matching line came to her: When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue. The teacher admitted that this had been slightly old-fashioned language even when the poem was written, which left the poet no excuse, Yarrow thought. Li Ch’ing-chao wrote in a style still lucid as water, in a language whose people didn’t wear out locutions with each generation.
Neptune was no solid hue; its deep blue stirred with white like sour cream into soup. Yarrow could observe it for hours, watching its whipped curds change shape as they crept across its face, imagining the forces that drove them. If her teacher had meant for them to think of Neptune, she had either missed it or forgotten. She was still musing on this when the voice addressed her.
“Relax your muscles,” it said in the Onboard’s uninflected tone. “The suit is about to move.”
Startled, Yarrow tensed, then ordered her body to relax. A second later her right hand swung up and carefully made a fist. The crash web released itself, and her legs drew up and kicked lightly against the couch. Yarrow drifted across the cabin and bumped against the screens.
“Hey! Give me control back. This suit isn’t a remote control device.”
Silence. Yarrow’s arms and legs were moving tentatively, like those of a recovered invalid exploring his range of motion. Yarrow pulled hard on her left forearm, and managed to impede slightly its slow wave.
“Am I being exercised? I appreciate the thought. How about speaking up again, since you have already come out?”
The clensuit extended its arms, working the fingers one by one. Suddenly Yarrow understood.