She looked up, toward the Sun, which was low on the horizon. Filters in her helmet blocked out the disc of the Sun itself, but that disc was three times as large as Earth’s Sun, a bloated monster.
She saw no humans above ground, none at all.
Her arrival at Chao City was processed by crude virtuals. These software robots had been designed to handle the arrival of speakers of incomprehensible languages from all over the Solar System. Their humanity smoothed out, they guided her wordlessly with simple mime and gesture. Chao City was a warren of corridors and tunnels hastily cut out of the bedrock. It was crowded with a dozen diverse races, a place full of suspicion and territoriality.
She was assigned a poky room, another cave like the one she’d endured on Triton — though this time, at least, carved from familiar silicate rock rather than water ice. How strange it was that humans, on whatever world they settled from one end of the Solar System to the other, were driven to burrow into the ground like moles.
The room contained a comms interface unit, inevitably of a very different design from those on Triton, with which, wearily, she battled. At last she found a way to instruct a contemporary analog of a data miner to find Nemoto — if she was indeed here on Mercury.
The comms unit began to ping softly. After no more than thirty minutes’ probing she found out that the sound meant the unit contained a message, waiting for her. Come see me. Nowadays I live in a crater called Bernini, not so far away from Chao. You’ll enjoy the view. It named a place and time.
It was from Dorothy Chaum.
She was kept waiting another twenty-four hours. Then she was taken to see somebody called an immigration officer. More bureaucracy, she thought with a sinking heart. Just like Triton; a universal human trait.
The immigration officer actually tried to speak to her in Latin. “Quo vadis? Quo animo?” — Where are you going? With what intention? She had brought her pressure-suit helmet with its embedded translator suite, and the office had similar facilities, so she waited patiently for the equipment to work.
The officer’s name was Carl ap Przibram. He was a native of an asteroid: tall, spindly, with a great eggshell of a skull under thick hair, and long bony fingers, a cliché pianist’s. His skin was pale, his features smoothed out, as if his skin was stretched; perhaps there were folds at his eyes, traces of an Asian ancestry, but any ethnic antecedents from Earth were long mixed and blurred. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable — as well he might, Madeleine thought, as he was effectively operating in multiples of the gravity he was used to.
When they were able to communicate he took her name, requested various identification numbers she didn’t have, then asked for a summary of her background. She listed her voyages beyond the stars. Using a workstation built into his desk, he brought up, from some deep database, a record on her, maintained over centuries. Ap Przibram seemed immersed in his job, all the documentation and procedure, utterly uninterested in the reality of the exotic fossil before him. It was a reaction she’d encountered on Triton, and many times before.
He requested that she make a donation of DNA samples. It was logical — a scheme to keep mankind’s small, isolated gene pools refreshed — though she’d heard of travelers who had patronized a flourishing black market in traveler genetic samples, notably sperm; the latter-day legend, happily encouraged by some travelers, was that the good stuff from these crude near-barbarians from a thousand years ago was more vigorous, more potent than the etiolated modern vintage.
At last he handed her a piece of plastic embedded with temporary ident codes, preliminary to a full implant; she took it gravely. “You are welcome here,” he told her.
“Thank you.” She raised the issue of her companions from Triton.
“Their applications will be processed as speedily as possible.” He fell silent, his drawn face impassive.
She tapped the desk with a fingernail. She found it hard to read his posture, the language of his face. “They’ve flown across the system, across thirty astronomical units, in landers designed for hundred-kilometer orbital hops. Those things are flying toilets. We have children, old people, disabled, ill…”
“We are processing their applications. Until that is concluded there’s nothing I can do.”
His eyes were hollow. The man is exhausted, she thought. He is overwhelmed, as Mercury is; and here I am with more refugees, boatloads of resentful ice dwellers from Triton. In such circumstances, bureaucracy is a medium of civilized discourse; at least he isn’t throwing me out.
She resolved to be patient.
At the appointed time she set off to meet Dorothy. There was a monorail link from Chao City to Bernini — slow, bumpy, uncomfortable, real pioneer stuff — and then she had to take a ride in an automated tractor, a thing of giant wire-mesh wheels, over lightly occupied Mercury.
She arrived at what Dorothy had referred to as a solarsail farm.
Outside the tractor she studied the sky.
She could see few stars. Solar-sail ships swam, dimly visible, like sparks from a fire, swarming around Mercury’s equator, bringing more refugees. But there was a haze across the sky, a mistiness surrounding that too-large Sun disc, and a pale wash farther out, like a starless Milky Way. She was seeing the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere, made visible by the artificial occulting of the central star. And the flat belt of light farther out was the zodiacal light, the shining of dust particles and meteorites and asteroids in the plane of the ecliptic. Once Gaijin cities had shone there; now the asteroid belt was deserted once more.
When she cupped her hands around her faceplate she could see the tail of yet another giant comet, smeared milkily over the black dome of the sky. She couldn’t see any Cracker ships, of course — not yet — even though, it was said, they had broken through the orbit of Neptune.
As the Oort war had turned sour, Mercury had been annexed by a coalition of nations from the asteroid colonies: the near-Earths, the main belt, even a few from the Trojans in Jupiter’s orbit. It was hardly an occupation; nobody but a few hermit types had been living here anyhow. The setup here was barely democratic — a situation which, to their credit, appeared to disturb the emergency government, the Coalition. But it was functioning.
The colonists had adapted technologies that had once been used in the initial colonization of the Moon: Once more, humans were forced to bake their air out of unyielding rock. But there were plans for the longer term — such as a Paulis mine at Caloris Planitia, the giant impact crater she’d observed from orbit. But this was not the Moon. Mercury was all iron core, with a little rocky rind. A different world, different challenges.
Now she picked out a double star, a bright double pinpoint, one partner strikingly blue, the other a pale gray-white…
“Earth, of course.” Here was Dorothy standing close by her side, in a suit so coated with black Mercury dust it was all but invisible, despite the brightness of the Sun. Her helmet was heavily shielded, just a golden bubble; Madeleine couldn’t see her face.
They exchanged meaningless pleasantries, awkward; there were no obvious protocols for a relationship such as theirs.
Then Dorothy loped heavily across the dusty plain. Madeleine, reluctantly, followed.
The regolith crunched under her feet, the noise clearly audible, carried through her suit. In the virgin dust she left footprints, clear and sharp as on the Moon, and the dust she threw up clung to the fabric of her suit. But her footing was heavy, in this double-Moon gravity. No bunny-hop moonwalking here.