Mercury. We managed to burn the evidence before the Gearheads got a close look: they couldn’t pin anything on us, so they went home empty-handed. That was 2085 – fifteen years before Eunice went to the edge of the system.’
‘At least we know what happened to one of the artilects,’ Jumai said. ‘What has Mercury got to do with this, here and now?’
‘Ocular found something,’ Geoffrey said, ‘just before Eunice died. Arethusa – Lin Wei – felt enough of a debt to her old friend to believe that Eunice ought to be told about the discovery. That seems to have been the trigger for . . . something.’ He offered an apologetic shrug. It was as much as he’d managed to piece together.
‘There’s a little more to it,’ the golem said. Eunice was leading them down an ice-walled tunnel. It had been bored roughly, then fixed with spray-on sealant. A walkway had been fastened to the floor, handrails and grabs to the walls, lights to the ceiling. The air was turning cold again. ‘Mercury was a double-blind. The artilect research was genuine, but that wasn’t the sole point of our being there. The basic physics research wasn’t just a screen. It was as equally valid – if not more important.’ She was skimming the tunnel in long, loping strides – human locomotion, not the limb-over-limb tumble that the golem had demonstrated earlier. And looking back, smiling with uncontained pleasure. It was the delight of someone who hadn’t had an audience in a very long while. She was enjoying the showmanship, her moment in the spotlight. ‘On Mercury, we tested a hypothesis. We constructed a relatively small-scale experimental physics facility to probe certain obscure byways of high-energy quark-quark interactions. There were bigger physics labs elsewhere – in Earth orbit, on the Moon – but we needed discretion. Above all, we had energy in abundance.’
‘What did you find?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘What appeared to be an unpromising little side-avenue . . . that turned out to lead to something astonishing. Utterly unsuspected, utterly unexplored. We’d broken through into an entire garden of new physics. We were breaching unification energies almost without trying. Seeing exotic-matter by-products that shouldn’t have been created since the universe was more than a couple of Planck-lengths wide.’ Eunice shook her head in amazement. ‘The wonder was that we didn’t blow ourselves off Mercury. We came close, in the early days. Then we dialled it back a bit and became cautious.
‘You say “we”,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Who else was in on this? You can’t keep that kind of thing secret if more than a handful of people are involved.’
‘Only a handful were,’ Eunice said. ‘With artilects and robots handling the complex construction and analysis tasks, it was easy enough to run the physics facility with just a skeleton crew – and most of them thought they were working on minor refinements to propulsion design. As to who knew the full story, there were just two of us.’
‘You were never a physicist,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I didn’t say I was.’
They’d reached the end of the ice-walled tunnel. The door here was as heavy and sturdily armoured as a surface airlock, fixed inside a frame that was obviously well braced into the surrounding ice. It opened for the golem, and she led Geoffrey and Jumai through it.
Inside was a small control room – just a couple of consoles and buckle-in seats facing three large triangular- framed windows screened with heavy-duty slats. The wall behind them, flanking either side of the door, was lined with grey lockers and equipment racks. There was some kind of decorative sculpture on the wall to Geoffrey’s right, while the one to his left was occupied by a single large display which appeared to show Lionheart and its environs at a variety of logarithmic scales, culminating in one that was big enough to encompass the iceteroid’s orbit around the sun. Geoffrey’s eyes tracked to the smaller orbits of the outer gas giants; then inwards to the still smaller paths of Saturn and Jupiter. Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury fell into an area he could easily have covered with the palm of his hand.
They were a long way out. Every now and again something would remind him of that, and the feeling was like vertigo. How could his grandmother ever willingly have sought this isolation, this sense of immense displacement from home?
‘It’s a shame your sister isn’t here,’ Eunice said. ‘I’d have liked her to see this.’
‘This’ was the sculpture, on the wall to his right. It was a slightly irregular rectangle, about the size of a Persian rug, fixed vertically against the wall. The rectangle was in fact a mosaic of smaller pieces – black shapes, mostly about the size of his hand, which, to judge by their jagged outlines, must once have fitted together to form a single whole. Now there were gaps and fissures where they didn’t quite join. There were also entire pieces missing from the edges and the middle – bites and absences where the grey backing of the wall showed through.
For all that their edges were irregular, the surfaces of the pieces – the visible faces – were as smooth as if they’d been chiselled along fracture lines. Aside from the occasional chipped or cratered piece, the dark mosaic was uniform in thickness. It gleamed with a magpie lustre, blues and greens shimmering back at Geoffrey, and within the shimmer the suggestion of faint intersecting scratches. Studying the scratches more intently, he made out what could almost have been totemic figures in cave art – a dance of headless, splayed-limb psychopomps made up of dashes and squiggles and spirals.
‘Would Sunday have recognised this?’ He wondered, momentarily, whether it might actually be his sister’s work, but he didn’t think so. With solid forms, her work tended towards the figurative. When she worked with abstract compositions, she employed every colour in the paintbox.
‘That would depend,’ Eunice said. She had positioned herself at one of the consoles and now opened the shutters covering the main windows. They whisked away with a series of loud clunks, leaving only glass between the control room and what was obviously a very large vacuum-filled cavity inside the iceteroid. ‘That shielding was never going to make much difference if one of the reactions went critical,’ Eunice remarked, ‘but it made me feel marginally safer knowing it was in place.’
They might have been looking at the interior of the drilling operation, spotlit for visitors. The cavity was impressively large – an easy kilometre across, stretching away to the left and right around a great curve so that the far ends were not visible from their vantage point. If in fact there were ends at all, for, Geoffrey decided, it was just as likely that the cavity was toroidal, a doughnut-shaped hole dug out of the middle of Lionheart. Bolstering that suspicion was the fact that a metal tube came around the bend of the cavity, passed by the observation point and continued on its arcing trajectory around the other end. The tube was fixed to the inner walls of the cavity by cartwheel-shaped assemblies, each shock-absorbing spoke as thick as a railway carriage. The tube itself was as wide as a major thoroughfare. Like a sated python, it bulged here and there, and secondary pipes branched out from it at various angles, plunging into the cavity wall.
‘A lot of metal,’ Geoffrey said.
