own streetlights in the skies of Triton and Ganymede. The effect out there was dramatic enough that there were more outer satellite settlements asking for Vulcan streetlights than there were Vulcanoids to provide them.
As their sundiver approached the Vulcan orbit, the image shown onscreen represented the sun as a red circle and the Vulcanoids as a loose necklace of brilliant yellow dots across and outside the red. Green lines representing the lased light extended from the yellow dots outward to the sides of the image. The sun bulked large in all the representations. It seemed a fiery great dragon, and yet they kept flying toward it-boldly, rashly-they were too close for comfort. It was a transgression sure to be punished. On one screen it looked like a burning red heart, the grainy texture of flowing cell tops like muscle cut against the grain. They must be too close.
From its antisolar side, the particular Vulcanoid they approached was a bare dark rock, a typical potato asteroid, surrounded by a silver umbrella a hundred times its size. The dock was in the middle of the rock. At a certain point near the end of their approach, the asteroid and its soletta created a solar eclipse, and the unnerving sight of the red sun became in the end a mere halo of coronal fire, flailing its electric aura; then they were in the dark, in the shelter of the Vulcanoid’s shade. It was a palpable relief.
The people inside the rock were sun worshippers, as might be expected. Some looked like the sunwalkers of Mercury’s outback, carefree and foolish; others seemed like ascetics of a religious order. Most were men or hermaphrodites. They lived in the closest solar orbit that an object could maintain; the so-called sundivers were craft that only dipped a bit closer to the sun and then fled. This was as close as one could live.
It was inherently a religious space; Swan could accept that, but had a hard time imagining the votaries’ lives. The terrarium inside the rock was a desert, which was appropriate in the circumstances, but extremely uncomfortable: hot, dry, dusty. Even the Mojave was lush compared to it.
So this was a form of self-mortification, and while Swan had tried many such forms in her youth, and during the height of her abramovics, she no longer believed in self-mortification as an end in itself. She also felt that this new technology in the solettas had altered the devotional nature of these people’s lives, turning them into something more like lighthouse keepers. Their new system was ten million times stronger than Mercury’s older light-transferring technology, which would henceforth be rendered historical, like an oil lamp. Both Mercury’s contribution to the Mondragon Accord and its ability to do above and beyonds were greatly diminished by this development, and one part of the compensation the Mondragon committee had suggested was that Terminator should be the coordinating agent and broker for this new Vulcan ability to transfer light; but it was a matter for the principals to work out. As it had been, by Alex; but now that Alex was gone, and the brokerage house had been torched, would their clients and/or fellow citizens remain loyal to the deal? Would they help rebuild their agent, their bank, their old home?
“Well,” one of them said after Kris had described Terminator’s hope that the deal would hold. “Getting light to the outer system is our contribution to the Mondragon and to humanity. We’re in a better position to do this than you are on Mercury. We know you helped us get started, but now the Saturnians are offering to cover the costs of building solettas on all the Vulcanoids that can support them. And they really need our light out there. So we’ll take up as much of their offer as we can. It’s a bit more than we can handle right now, to tell the truth. We’re still fine- tuning the second generations. There are issues we’re still working on. We don’t have enough people to take advantage of everything they’re offering us.”
Kris was nodding. “You need our help to coordinate the whole effort. You’re down here peeling around at speed, getting cooked and getting your stations going.”
They thought that over. Their speaker said, “Maybe so. But when Terminator was out of commission, we had no problems. Now we’re thinking that Mercury should contribute to the Mondragon with things other than light, and leave us to it. You’ve got heavy metals, art history, and Terminator itself as a work of art, a tourist destination for the grand tour and for sun watchers. You’ll be fine.”
Kris shook her head. “We’re the capital of the inner system. With all due respect, you people operate power stations here. You need administration.”
“Maybe.”
Swan said, “Which Saturnians have you been talking to about this?”
They stared at her. “They speak to us as a league,” one of them replied. “But we have the same Saturnian liaison you do-their inner planets ambassador. You know him better than we do, from what we hear.”
“You mean Wahram?”
“Of course. He told us that you Mercurials knew the interplanetary situation, and would understand how important our light is to the Titan project. And to all the other outer planets as well.”
Swan did not reply.
Kris began discussing the Triton settlement and the plan there to stellarize Neptune.
“Yes,” one of the Vulcans replied, “but the Saturnians won’t do that to Saturn.”
Swan interrupted them: “Tell me more about Wahram; when did he visit you?”
“A couple years ago, I think.”
“Two years?”
“Wait,” another of them put in. “Our year is only six weeks long, so that was a joke there. It was just recently.”
“It was since Terminator burned,” the first speaker clarified, looking at her curiously.
Kris filled in the silence that followed, reminding the Vulcans that as the new Lion of Mercury, Kris was now the titular head of their order. But these particular Vulcans were not Greys, as they were quick to inform Kris; they were adherents of some schismatic sect that did not consider the Lion of Mercury to be their head. Nevertheless they were very polite, and Kris continued to try to convince them to keep the deal; but Swan had trouble following the conversation. She was getting angrier at Wahram the longer she considered what he had done, to the point where she wasn’t listening anymore. Right in the time he had said he would work with her, after they had found the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, he had come down here instead and undermined her cause. It was a hard little sucker punch.
Lists (11)
Annie Oakley Crater, Dorothy Sayers Crater.
Also craters named for: Madame Sevigne, Shakira (a Bashkir goddess), Martha Graham, Hippolyta, Nina Efimova, Dorothea Erxleben, Lorraine Hansberry, Catherine Beevher; also the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, the Celtic river goddess, the Woyo rainbow goddess, the Pueblo Indian corn goddess, the Vedic goddess of plenty, the Roman goddess of the hunt (Diana), the Latvian goddess of fate; also Anna Comnena, Charlotte Corday, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Stael, Simone de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker. Also Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. Tezan, the Etruscan goddess of the dawn. Alice B. Toklas. Xantippe. Empress Wuhou. Virginia Woolf. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Evangeline, Fatima, Gloria, Gaia, Helen, Heloise. Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston. Guinevere, Nell Gwyn, Martine de Beausoleil. Sophia Jex-Blake, Jerusha Jirad, Angelica Kauffman. Maria Merian, Maria Montessori, Marianne Moore. Mu Guiying. Vera Mukhina. Aleksandra Potanina. Margaret Sanger. Sappho. Zoya. Sarah Winnemucca. Seshat. Jane Seymour. Rebecca West. Marie Stopes. Alfonsina Storni. Anna Volkova. Sabina Steinbach. Mary Wollstonecraft. Anna von Schuurman. Jane Austen. Wang Zenyi. Karen Blixen. Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman. Hera. Emily Dickinson.
Kim Stanley Robinson
WAHRAM ON VENUS
Wahram was in the city of Colette, trying to get at least some of the Venus Working Group to support the plan to intervene on Earth; also to ask certain Venusian friends for help in Genette’s plan to deal with the strange qubes. Neither project was going particularly well, even though Shukra seemed willing to help; but he wanted help in return, in dealing with his local conflicts, and Wahram didn’t see how that could be done. More would be needed from the Mondragon and Saturn both if they were going to entrain any of the Venusians in the upcoming Terran effort.
Then during a welcome break in the negotiations there was a knock at the conference chamber door, and Swan came in. He was shocked to see her, and shocked again when she saw him, strode across the room, crashed
