“In the end,” he said, “none of this may matter. The Crackers have little interest in our history and our disputes and our intrigues with each other.”
“It’s true. We’re vermin to them.” Anger flared in her at that thought, the word Dorothy had used.
But it’s true, she thought.
This, here on Mercury, may be the largest concentration of humans left anywhere. And if the Crackers succeed in their project, it will be the end of mankind. None of our art or history, our lives and hopes and loves, will matter. We’ll be just another forgotten, defeated race, just another layer of organic debris in the long, grisly history of a mined-out Solar System.
I can’t let that happen, she thought. I must see Nemoto again.
On the surface of Mercury, Nemoto sighed. “You know, the Crackers’ strategy — making Suns nova — isn’t really all that smart. When you’re more than a few diameters away from your disrupted star it starts dwindling into a point source, and the light wind’s intensity falls off rapidly. But if you have a giant star — say a red giant — you are sailing with a wall of light behind you, and you get a runaway effect; it takes much longer for the wind to dwindle. You see?”
“So—”
“So the best strategy for the Crackers would be to tamper with the Sun’s evolution. To make it old before its time, to balloon it to a red giant that would reach out to Earth’s orbit, and ride out that fat crimson wind. But the Crackers aren’t smart enough for that. None of the ETs out there are really smart, you know.”
“Maybe the Crackers are working on an upgrade,” Madeleine suggested dryly.
“Oh, no doubt,” Nemoto said, matter-of-fact. “The question is, will they have time to figure out how to do it before their race is run?”
“Why haven’t you told the refugees what you are up to, Nemoto?”
“Meacher, the people on this ball of iron are conservative — and split. There are many factions here. Some believe the Crackers may be placated. That these ETs will just leave of their own accord.”
“That’s ridiculous. The Crackers can’t leave. They must dismantle the Sun to continue their expansion.”
“Nevertheless, such views are held. And such factions would, if they knew of my project, seek to shut me down.”
“So what do we do?”
“The settlers here must go as deep as they can, deep into the interior.”
Just as Dorothy Chaum had said. “When?”
“When the Cracker ships are here. When all the wasps have swarmed to the honey pot.”
“I’ll try. But what of you, Nemoto?”
Nemoto just laughed.
Madeleine leaned forward. “Tell me what happened to Malenfant.”
Nemoto would not meet her eyes.
She told Madeleine something of what sounded like a long and complicated story, embedded in Earth’s tortured latter history, of a Saddle Point gateway in the heart of a mountain in Africa. Her account was cool, logical, without feeling.
“So he went back,” Madeleine said. “Back through the Saddle Points, back to the Gaijin, after all.”
“You don’t understand,” Nemoto said without emotion. “He had no choice. I sent him back. I manipulated the situation to achieve that…”
Madeleine covered Nemoto’s cold hand.
“…Just as I have manipulated half of mankind, it seems. I exiled Malenfant, against his will.” Nemoto continued sharply. “I believe I have sent him to his death, Meacher. But if it is a crime, it will be justified — if the Gaijin can make use of that death.”
“I guess you have to believe that,” Madeleine murmured.
“Yes. Yes, I have to.”
Her manner was odd — even for Nemoto — too cool, logical; too bright, Madeleine thought.
Madeleine knew that no human could survive more than a thousand years without emptying a clutter of memory from her overloaded head. Nemoto must have found a way to edit her memories, to reorder, even delete them — a process, of course, that meant the editing of her personality too.
Perhaps she has attempted to cleanse her memories of Malenfant, her guilt over her betrayal of him. That is how she has been able to achieve such distance from it.
But if so, she was only partially successful. For this action against the Crackers, whatever it is, will kill her, Madeleine realized.
And Nemoto is embracing the prospect.
Madeleine worked hard on Carl ap Przibram, trying to get him to take Nemoto’s advice seriously. It wasn’t easy, given her lack of any detailed understanding of what Nemoto might be trying to attempt. But at last he yielded and got her a slot before the Coalition’s top council.
It was an uneasy session. It took place in a steamy cave crammed with a hundred delegates from different factions, none of them natives, jammed in here against their will in the bowels of Mercury. There was a range of body types, she observed, mostly variants on the tall, stick-thin, low-gravity template; but there were a number of delegates adapted for zero gravity, even exotic atmospheres, in environment tanks, wheelchairs, and other supportive apparatus.
She faced rows of faces glaring with suspicion, fear, self-interest, even contempt. This wasn’t going to be easy. But she recognized, here in the main governing council, one of the women from the Triton transports, which had at last been allowed to land. These people were prickly, awkward, superstitious, fearful. But even in this dire strait, they welcomed refugees, and even gave them a place at the top table.
It made her obscurely proud. This is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome. This: even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.
She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feeta good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn’t always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.
Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good 60 percent of the planet’s population agreed to concur with Nemoto’s advice.
Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room and slept twelve hours.
The final evacuation was swift.
The remnants of humanity had fled inward, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop suborbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving Sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.
And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These ETs clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.
Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.
Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.
They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl’s body several times at least. On the way, she’d decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both — she suspected — secretly relieved.