It saddened her that nothing — save a few sentimental tokens like paintings — survived of the Aboriginal culture that Ben’s generation had brought here. After all, even fifteen hundred years on Triton were dwarfed by maybe sixty thousand years of Australia. But the Dreamtime legends, it seemed, had not survived the translation from the ancient deserts of Australia to these enclosed, high-tech bubbles.
She reached the center of the kilometers-wide colony. Here, a great structure loomed out of the ice-crusted sea, visible through picture windows. It was mounted on a stalk, and it reared up to a great dome-shaped carapace some hundreds of meters above the ice. It was a little like a water tower. She picked out engineering features: evaporators, demisters, generators, turbines, condenser tubing. Madeleine learned that this tower was based on a taproot that descended far into the ocean, kilometers deep, in fact.
This was the otec. The name turned out to be an acronym from old English, for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. It was a device to extract energy from the heat difference between the deep ocean waters, at just four degrees below freezing, and the surface ice, at more than a hundred below. The otec turned out to be the main power source for the colony. It was fifteen hundred years old, as old as the colony itself, and it was maintained by the colonists with a diligent, monkish devotion. There were other power sources, like fusion plants. But the colonists were short of metal; the nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometers of water. The colonists were able to fix the otec, clunky machinery through it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.
After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.
It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.
Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smocklike affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colors — red, blue, green — a contrast to the drab environment.
He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.
He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How could he be like Ben, sixty generations removed?
His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name — and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. “You’re the same Madeleine Meacher who—”
“Yes.”
“How very strange. Of course we have records.” He smiled. “There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.”
“I was there for the live show, remember.”
“Yes. You must have fascinating stories.” He didn’t sound all that fascinated, though, to Madeleine; it seemed clear he’d rather show her the records his family had cherished than hear her testimony from history. The past was a thing to own, to lock away in boxes and archives, not to explore.
It wasn’t the first time she had encountered such a reaction.
He made her a meal in his home, which was a multichamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn’t based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.
Adamm’s clothes were made from seaweed — or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silklike threads and was the basis of virtually all the colonists’ clothing and other fabric, as well as products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.
They talked tentatively while they ate.
Adamm made a minor living making pearl artifacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snufflike powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.
Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm’s home, and he was used to its conditions.
Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low-gravity environment of Triton, and with antiaging mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony’s life support. “We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity…”
The biosphere was just too small.
Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.
He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.
She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.
After the meal, they took a walk.
He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed, and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune’s faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.
She said, “I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is… eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earthlike.”
She glimpsed hostility on his face.
“Travelers like you have returned before,” he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. “What does it matter if Triton is Earthlike or not? Madeleine, I’ve never seen Earth. Why would I want to?”
The little clash depressed her. Of course he’s right, she thought; Earth must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations… We humans just can’t maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.
While the Gaijin sail on.
As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.
She grabbed Adamm’s hand; he recoiled from her touch. “There. Did you see that?”
Ne. “…No.”
There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. “It’s not just a light in the sky,” she said defensively. “It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus—”
“This is your war?” Adamm asked reluctantly.
“Adamm, the war isn’t mine. But it is real…”
A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth — something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry that was high-pitched and complex, like a door creaking.
Then it flipped backward and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.
“War,” Adamm said sourly. Then he sighed. “I suppose you mean well. But it seems so… remote.”
“Believe me, it isn’t. Adamm, I’m going to need your help. The headman won’t see me. You have to help me convince people.”