deal with the Vulcanoids now that Terminator had been destroyed. Wahram pointed out to his colleagues that Terminator would be quickly rebuilt and repopulated, and thus remain a treaty partner with whom they already had an agreement. Alex’s death did not change that agreement. He could see that while this was obviously the case, stating it aloud only tagged him among his colleagues as biased, which was true, so after that he went silent and only listened to what the others said about it, which really was nothing surprising: many of them had not liked the arrangement with Mercury in the first place, and now they reverted to these views and argued that they should be making their deals with some kind of Vulcanoid league, or even with individual Vulcanoids. These were not, after all, spaceships, but small asteroids located in the gravitationally stable orbit between. 06 and. 21 astronomical units from the sun-thirty-kilometer rocks, white-hot on their sunward surfaces, and just big enough to spin out their solettas and contain in their interiors the little habitats that their operators or votaries lived in. These were city- states just like any other city-states, some of Wahram’s colleagues insisted, and should not be represented by some exterior power like Terminator, no matter what Alex had asserted. How would the city-states of the Saturn League like it if some Jovian party claimed to represent them just because it orbited between Saturn and the rest of civilization? Wasn’t that ultimately the argument that Terminator had been making in this case? Wasn’t this in fact yet another move in what some had called the Alexandrine Integration, the offline effort to bypass the AIs and unify the entire system-under Alex?
Not exactly, others had replied, to Wahram’s relief, as he had been working with Alex on precisely this project, which was not exactly as characterized by these colleagues but would be difficult to explain in the context of that accusation. Much better to observe silently and let the argument drag on in the long and leisurely way typical of the council, until it had moved on its own to something else. The councilors from Hyperion and Tethys were the main reasons this would take a while; they were both very long-winded, also maniacally focused on the minutiae of matters they took an interest in. The council was one of the many organizations in the Saturn League made up of drafted temporary workers, and the permanent staff there to assist them often had to Sir Humphrey the process along, guiding their employers invisibly through every decision. But some of the ministers, having been selected by lottery and assigned a year’s responsibility for the Saturn system’s welfare, intended to be in full command of their own decisions, and to make the best decisions they could by being fully informed. Admirable in theory, it was painfully slow in practice.
So in this discussion the dispute kept on seesawing between the idea that Mercury was the legitimate, or in any case agreed-upon, broker in the matter, and furthermore could make things difficult-and besides had things to offer Saturn-and the idea that the Mercurials were interlopers who had succeeded in imposing a protection racket on the new little settlements inside it, and so should be finessed out of the deal in this their winter of discontent.
Ultimately the council came to a conclusion Wahram had foreseen hours before: as Wahram himself was so sympathetic to the Mercurials, he was to return there and see what the situation was, talk to the lion cubs and find out who the next Lion would be, and then also go visit the Vulcanoids and see what they had to say for themselves-see what they thought of the arrangement Mercury had proposed to Saturn. He was instructed to revise Terminator out of the deal if he thought that would work.
Probably he should have refused to do it based on his dislike for that last instruction, but it occurred to him that a different delegate might mean an even worse result for the Mercurials. And after all, the assignment meant he would very soon return sunward, which was interesting to contemplate. As for his instructions, he could see about that when he got there. In Alex’s realm in particular, an ambassador was again as of old, a diplomat at large, charged with making decisions as well as conveying them. By the time he got there it could very well be a different story. With a little forethought, he could be almost sure it would be a different story.
So he said nothing beyond a simple acceptance of the assignment.
At which point the Satyr of Pan stood to speak. “You must tell us if you think this effort will make trouble for the other projects Alex had going. Can you remind the council what’s at stake here, and how those projects are going in her absence?”
Wahram nodded stiffly as he thought over his response. He and the other Alexandrines were attempting to keep a low profile, and some of the council members had not paid enough attention to notice their projects’ authorization and budgeting inside larger expenditures. “Alex kept things separate in her calculations, so that won’t be a problem for us. Some other matters are being dealt with by a group centered around Wang and Inspector Jean Genette. We would need to go under a cone of silence to discuss all this in detail, but suffice it to say, Alex was heavily involved with a Mondragon project to help Earth cope with its various problems by ecological means. A lot of the terraria in the Mondragon are working on that, it has its own momentum, and we’ve agreed to help them. Then also there is an investigation going on into the role of qubes in some questionable activities, on Mars, Venus, Io, and elsewhere. This also will proceed no matter what happens with the Vulcanoids, which is only an above and beyond, although admittedly an important one.”
The council, not wanting to retire into the cone and be cut off from the cloud and radio, adjourned the meeting. Wahram returned to his room. His creche kept an apartment in a little block of apartments, all clustered around a square that was occupied almost entirely by Titans, with Titanic shops and restaurants. There he lived among his crechemates and enjoyed their support, which was so benign and understanding that life there much resembled living in complete solitude. As the days passed before the spaceliner that would take him downsystem arrived, he walked the city spine to the council meetings, he followed the work on Titan in daily consultations, and he did his share of Iapetus work in the kitchen of the dining hall on the ground floor of their building. He attended a concert series, joined the little group of musicians in the park, filled and emptied dishwashers. As he dodged diners and servers in the hall, the repeated minuscule navigational challenges reminded him of Proust’s comparison of a restaurant in action with the whirling planets of the solar system, which had struck him as fanciful (not to mention quite a scale shift between vehicle and tenor) until he had seen it for himself, in restaurant after restaurant: their affairs were elaborations of the second law of thermodynamics, Beckian diffusions of energy through the universe, and around they went in the great orrery of their lives. Soon he would descend sunward and seek out the Mercurial.
But then she called him. She was coming to Saturn, with Jean Genette; they wanted to descend into the clouds of Saturn to look for a spaceship possibly adrift in the big beauty’s upper layers. She wanted him to arrange the dive into Saturn, if possible, and then join them in it.
“That would be fine,” he replied; “I am at your disposal.” Which was certainly one way of putting it.
Lists (8)
Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, and Mimas; these are the moons that shepherd Saturn’s rings.
The rings are only 400 million years old, the result of a passing Kuiper belt ice asteroid being stripped to its core when it passed Saturn too closely.
Mimas, the bull’s-eye moon, is 400 kilometers in diameter, while its crater Herschel is 140. The Herschel impact nearly blew Mimas apart.
Hyperion is a fragment of a similar collision that did blow a moon apart; it is shaped like a hockey puck. The impact caused flash steam explosions across a plane and split the moon as if spalling granite. The facet left behind is pocked like a wasps’ nest by a field of rimless dust-filled craters.
Pandora is shaped like a jelly bean.
Tethys and Dione were both about 1,100 kilometers across (think France), both fractured all over their surfaces, etched by canyons with mile-high walls. Tethys’s Ithaca Chasma is twice as deep and four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and a thousand times older, very battered by Saturn’s everlasting civil wars.
Dione, on the other hand, was disassembled by self-replicating ice cutters in the 2110s, and the Hector-sized segments were then directed downsystem to Venus. They struck Venus on a line parallel to the equator and provided Venus with a deep ocean bed and the water to fill it, while also knocking a good bit of the choking Venusian atmosphere off into space.
Rhea is as wide as Alaska, with the usual plethora of craters, including fresh ones that throw bright ice rays out from their centers.
Iapetus orbits seventeen degrees out of the plane of Saturn’s equator and thus has one of the best views of the rings; is therefore popular. The bulge is the biggest city in the Saturnian system.
