Madeleine wondered if that was normal.
But there was nothing normal about a woman who had lived through seventeen centuries, for God’s sake. Nemoto was probably the oldest human being who had ever lived; to survive, Nemoto must have put herself through endless reengineering, of both body and mind. And, unlike the lonely star travelers, she had lived through all those years on worlds full of people: Earth, the Moon, Mercury. Her biography must run like an unbroken thread through the tangled tapestry of a millennium and a half of human history.
But Madeleine truthfully knew little of this ancient, enigmatic woman. Had she ever married, ever fallen in love? Had she ever had children? And if so, were they alive — or had she outlived generation after generation of descendants? Perhaps nobody knew, nobody but Nemoto herself. And Nemoto would talk of none of this, refused to be drawn as she tended her plants of glass.
But in her slow-moving, aged way, she seemed focused, Madeleine thought. Determined, vigorous. Almost happy. As if she had a mission.
Madeleine decided to challenge her.
She walked among the glassy leaves. She bent, awkwardly, and picked up a glimmering leaf; it broke away easily. It was very fine, fragile. When she crushed it carelessly, it crumbled.
Nemoto made a small move toward her, a silent admonition.
Madeleine dropped the leaf carefully. “I’ve been reading up,” she said.
“You have?”
“On you. On your, umm, career.” She waved a hand at the leaves. “I think I know what you’re doing here.”
“Tell me.”
“Moon flowers. You brought them here, to Mercury. This isn’t just about growing solar sails. There are Moon flowers all over this damn planet. You’ve been seeding them, haven’t you?”
Nemoto hunkered down and studied the plant before her. “They grow well here. The sunlight, you see. I gen-enged them — if you can call it that; the genetic material of these flowers is stored in a crystalline substrate that is quite different from our biochemistry. Well. I removed some unnecessary features.”
“Unnecessary?”
“The rudimentary nervous system. The traces of consciousness.”
“Nemoto — why? Will dying Mercury become a garden?”
“What do you think, Meacher?”
“That you’re planning to fight back. Against the Crackers.You are remarkable, Nemoto. Even now, even here, you continue the struggle… And these flowers have something to do with it.”
Nemoto was as immobile as her flowers, the delicate glass petals reflected in her visor. “I wonder how they started,” she said. “The Crackers. How they began this immense, destructive odyssey. Have you ever thought about that? Surely no species intends to become a breed of rapacious interstellar locusts. Perhaps they were colonists on some giant starship, a low-tech, multigeneration ark. But when they got to their destination they’d gotten too used to spaceflight. So they built more ships, and just kept going… Perhaps the gimmick — blowing up the target Sun for an extra push — came later. And once they’d worked out how to do it, reaped the benefits, they couldn’t resist using it. Over and over.”
“Not a strategy designed to make them popular.”
“But all that matters, in this Darwinian Galaxy of ours,is short-term effectiveness. No matter how many Suns you destroy, how many worlds you trash, there simply isn’t the timeto have qualms about such things. And so it goes, as the Galaxy turns, oblivious to the tiny beings warring and dying on its surface…”
She walked on, tending her garden, and Madeleine followed.
“You must help us,” Carl ap Przibram said.
Madeleine sat uncomfortably, wondering how to respond. She felt claustrophobic in this bureaucrat’s office, crushed by the layers of Mercury rock over her head, the looming nearness of the Sun: as if she could somehow sense its huge weight, its warp of space.
He leaned forward. “For fifteen centuries my people lived like this.” He held up his hands, indicating the close rocky walls. “In environments that were enclosed. Fragile. Shared.” His face clouded with anger, hostility. “We didn’t have the luxury for… aggression. Warfare.”
Now she understood. “As we did, on ‘primitive Earth.’ Is that what you think? But my world was small too. We could have unleashed a war that might have made the planet uninhabitable.”
“That’s true.” He jabbed a Chopin finger at her. “But you didn’t think that way, did you? You, Madeleine Meacher, used to ship weapons, from one war zone to another. That was your job, how you made a living.
“You come from a unique time. We remember it even now;we are taught about it. Uniquely wasteful. You were still fat onenergy, from Earth’s ancient reserves. You managed to get a toehold on other worlds, the Moon. But you squandered your legacy — turned it into poisons, in fact, that trashed your planet’s climate.”
She stood up. “I’ve heard this before.” It was true; the bitterness at the well-recorded profligacy of her own “fat age” had scarcely faded in the centuries since, and the travelers, time-stranded refugees from that era, made easy targets for bile and prejudice. But it scarcely mattered now. “Carl ap Przibram, tell me what you want of me.”
“I’ve been authorized to deal with you. To offer you what we can…”
It turned out to be simple, unexpected. Impossible. The Coalition wanted to put her in charge of Mercury’s defenses: assembling weapons and a fighting force of some kind, training them up, devising tactics. Waging war on the Crackers.
She laughed; ap Przibram looked offended. She said, “You think I’m some kind of warrior barbarian, come from the past to save you with my primitive instincts.”
He glared. “You’re more of a warrior — and a barbarian — than I will ever be.”
“This is absurd. I know nothing of your resources, your technology, your culture. How could I lead you?” She eyed him, suspicious. “Or is there another game being played here? Are you looking for a fall guy? Is that it?”
He puzzled over the translation of that. Then his frown deepened. “You are facetious, or foolish. If we fail to defend ourselves, there will be no ‘fall guys.’ In the worst case there will be nobody left at all, blameworthy or otherwise. We are asking you because…”
Because they are desperate, she thought, these gentle, spindly, asteroid-born people. Desperate, and terrified, in the face of this Darwinian onslaught from the stars.
“I’ll help any way I can,” she said. “But I can’t be your general. I’m sorry,” she added.
He closed his eyes and steepled his fingers. “Your friends, the refugees from Triton, are still in orbit.”
“I know that,” she snapped.
He said nothing.
“Oh,” she said, understanding. “You’re trying to bargain with me.” She leaned on the desk. “I’m calling your bluff. You haven’t let them starve up there so far. You won’t let them die. You’ll bring them down when you can; you aren’t serious in your threats.”
His thin face twisted with embarrassment. “This wasn’t my idea, Madeleine Meacher.”
“I know that,” she said more gently.