“Ah.”
She thought she understood; of course, she didn’t. And in her unthinking way she launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared…
Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated Sun.
“I think,” she said, “you should drink more soup.”
But he had no more need of soup.
It seemed too soon when the Day was done, and the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho sea.
Xenia summoned Berge’s friends, teachers, those who had loved him.
She clung to the greater goaclass="underline" that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc that had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus — killing them all, in fact, at one rate or another — would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel that had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit that would lift the first ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.
Perhaps. It was cold comfort.
But still they ate the soup, of Berge’s dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. They took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening their own lives as he had.
She had never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. She talked with Berge’s teachers, but they had little to say to each other; she was merely his grandmother, after all. She wasn’t sorry to be left alone.
Before she slept again, even before the Sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warmer air was treacherously fleeing after the sinking Sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho sea.
Her seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Moon core ice.
Chapter 29
Bad News from the Stars
When Madeleine Meacher arrived back in the Solar System — just moments after passing through the pain of her last Saddle Point transition — she was stunned to find Nemoto materializing in the middle of her small hab module.
“Nemoto. You. What…? How…?”
Nemoto was small, hunched over, her face a mask of sourness. This was a virtual, of course, and a low-quality one; Nemoto floated in the air, not quite lined up with the floor.
Nemoto glanced about, as if surprised to be here. “Meacher. So it’s you. What date is it?”
Madeleine had to look it up: A.D. 3793.
Nemoto laughed hollowly. “How absurd.”
There was no perceptible time delay. That meant the originating transmitter must be close. But, of course, there had been no way Nemoto could have known which Saddle Point gateway Madeleine would arrive from. “Nemoto, what are you?”
Nemoto grunted impatiently. “I am a limited-sentience projection. My function is to wait for the star travelers to return. I dusted the Saddle Point radius, all around the system. Dusted it with monitors, probes, transmitters. Technology has moved on, Meacher. Look it up. It scarcely matters… Listen to what I have to say.”
“Nemoto—”
“Listen, damn you. The Gaijin have been fighting the Crackers. Out on the rim of the system.”
“I know that—”
“The war has lasted five centuries, perhaps more. The Oort cloud is deep, Meacher, a deep trench. But now the war is lost.”
The simple, stunning brutality of the statement shocked Madeleine. “Are you sure?”
Nemoto barked laughter. “The Gaijin are withdrawing from the Solar System. They don’t bother to hide this from us. Just as most people don’t bother to look up, into the sky, and see what is going on… Oh, many of the Gaijin remain: scouts, observers, transit craft like this one. But the bulk of the Gaijin fleet — mostly constructed from stolen Solar System resources, our asteroids — has begun to withdraw to the Saddle Points. The outer system war is over.”
“And the Crackers…”
“Are on the way into the inner system. They are already through the heliopause, the perimeter of the solar wind.” The virtual flickered, became blocky, all but transparent. “The endgame approaches.”
“Nemoto, what must I do?”
“Go to Mercury. Find me.” She looked down at herself, as if remembering. “That is, find Nemoto.”
“And what of you? Nemoto, what is a limited-sentience projection?”
Nemoto raised a hand that was crumbling into bits of light. She seemed puzzled, as if she was finding out for herself as she spoke. “I am autonomous, heuristic, sentient. I was born sixty seconds ago, to give you this message. But my function is fulfilled. I’m dying.” She looked at Madeleine, as if shocked by the realization, and reached out.
Madeleine extended a hand, but her fingers passed through a cloud of light.
With a thin wail, the Nemoto virtual broke up.
Sailing in from the rim of the Solar System, Madeleine used Gaijin technology to study the strange new age into which she had been projected.
There was little Gaijin traffic, just as virtual Nemoto had said.
But she found signatures of unknown ships — solar-sail craft, they appeared to be, great fleets of them, a gigantic shell that surrounded the system. They were still out among the remote orbits of the comets for now, but they were converging, like a fist closing on the fat warmth of the inner system.
Cracker fleets, come to disrupt the Sun.
Earth seemed dead. The Moon was a fading blue, silent. There were knots of human activity in the asteroids, on Mars — and on Triton. And she found signs of refugee fleets, humans fleeing inward to the core of the system, to Mercury. But no ships arrived at or left remote Triton.
When she understood that, she knew where she must go first.
The Gaijin flower-ship sailed around Triton, its fusion light illuminating smooth plains of ice. It was a world covered by a chill ocean, like Earth’s Arctic, with not a scrap of solid land; but the thin ice crust was easily broken by the slow pulsing tides of this small moon, exposing great black leads of water that bubbled and steamed vigorously, trying to evaporate and fill up all of empty space.
There were six human settlements.
The settlements looked like clusters of bubbles on a pond, she thought. They were sprawling, irregular patches of modular construction — not rigid, clearly designed to float over the tides. Five settlements seemed abandoned — no lights, no power output, no sign of an internal temperature significantly above the background. Even the sixth looked largely shut down, with only a handful of lights at the center of the bubble-cluster, the outskirts abandoned to the cold.
She radioed down requests for permission and instructions for landing. Only automated beacons responded. The answers came through in a human voice, but in a language she didn’t recognize. The translation suite embedded in her equipment couldn’t handle it either. She had the Gaijin put her down on what appeared to be a landing site, close to a system of air locks.