years, perhaps. And Earth life — lightly modified anyhow — could inhabit the new ocean. Deep-sea creatures — plankton, fish, even whales — could live off the heat of Triton’s churning core. Triton, here on the edge of interstellar space, has become Earthlike. Imagine the future for these Aborigines,” Nemoto said seductively. “Triton was the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite. How apt…”
This was Nemoto’s finest hour, Madeleine thought, this heroic effort to deflect not just worlds, but the course of history itself. She tried to cling to her own feelings of triumph, but it was thin, lonely comfort.
“One more thing, Meacher.” Virtual Nemoto leaned toward her, intent, wizened. “One more thing I must tell you…”
Later, she called Ben.
“When are you coming home?” he asked.
“I’m not.”
Ben frowned at her. “You are being foolish.”
“No. Kasyapa is your home, and Lena’s. Not mine.”
“Then where? Earth? The Moon?”
“I am centuries out of my time,” she said. “Not there either.”
“You’re going back to the Saddle Points. But you are the great Gaijin hater, like Nemoto.”
She shrugged. “I oppose their projects. But I’ll ride with them. Why not? Ben, they run the only ship out of port.”
“What do you hope to learn out there?”
She did not answer.
Ben was smiling. “Madeleine, I always knew I would lose you to starlight.”
She found it hard to focus on his face, to listen to his words. He was irrelevant now, she saw. She cut the connection.
She thought over the last thing Nemoto had said to her.
Chapter 23
It had to be the ugliest planet Madeleine had ever seen.
It was a ball the size of Earth, spinning slowly, lit up by an unremarkable yellow star. The land was a contorted, blackened mess of volcano calderas, rift and compression features, and impact craters that looked as if they had been punched into a metal block. Seas, lurid yellow, pooled at the shores of distorted continents. And the air was a thin, smoggy, yellowish wisp, littered with high mustard-colored cirrus clouds.
On the planet there were no obvious signs of life or intelligence: no cities gleaming on the dark side, no ships sailing those ugly yellow oceans. But there were three Gaijin flower-ships in orbit here, Madeleine’s and two others.
Her curiosity wasn’t engaged.
All the Gaijin would tell her about the planet was the name they gave it — Zero-zero-zero-zero — and the reason they had brought her here, across a hundred light-years via a hop-skip-jump flight between Saddle Point gateways in half a dozen systems, a whole extra century deeper into the future: that they needed her assistance.
Reluctantly — after a year in transit, she had gotten used to her lonely life in her antique
Madeleine stepped onto the land of a new world.
Ridges in the hard crumpled ground hurt her feet. The air was murky gray, but more or less transparent; she could see the Sun, dimmed to an unremarkable disc as if by high winter cloud. Immediately she didn’t like it here. The gravity was high — not crushing, but enough to make her heavy-footed, the bio pack on her back a real burden.
Numbers scrolling across her faceplate told her the gravity was some 40 percent higher than Earth’s. And, since this world was about the same size as Earth, that meant that its density had to be around 40 percent higher too: closer to the density of pure iron.
Earth was a ball of nickel-iron overlaid by a thick mantle of less dense silicate rock. The high density of
That wasn’t so strange. There are ways that could happen, in the violent early days of a system’s formation, when immense rogue planetesimals continue to bombard planets that are struggling to coalesce. Mercury, the Solar System’s innermost planet, had suffered an immense primordial impact that had left that little world with the thinnest of mantles over its giant core.
At least human scientists had presumed it was primordial. Nobody was sure about such things anymore.
She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal.
There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned.
Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.
Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.
She walked farther, away from the lander, which was a silvery cone behind her. She was only a few kilometers from the shore of one of those yellow seas; she figured it was on the far side of a low, crumpled ridge.
She reached the base of the ridge and began to climb. In the tough gravity she was given a good workout; she could feel her temperature rising, the suit’s exoskeletal multipliers discreetly cutting in to give her a boost.
She topped the ridge, breathing hard. A plain opened up before her: shaded red and black, littered by sand dunes and what looked like a big, heavily eroded impact crater. And off toward the smoky horizon, yes, there was that peculiar yellow ocean, wraiths of greenish mist hanging over it. It was a bizarre, surrealist landscape, as if all Earth’s colors had been exchanged for their spectral complements.
And, only a hundred meters from the base of the ridge, she saw two Gaijin landers, silver cones side by side, each surrounded by fine rays of dust thrown out by landing rockets. Beside one of the landers was a Gaijin, utterly still, a spidery statue. Next to the other stood a human, in an exo-suit that didn’t look significantly different than Madeleine’s.
The human saw her, waved.
Madeleine hesitated for long seconds.
Suddenly the world seemed crowded. She hadn’t encountered people since she had last embraced Ben, on Triton. She’d certainly never met another traveler like this, among the stars. But it must have taken decades, even centuries, for the Gaijin to organize this strange rendezvous.
She began to clamber down the ridge toward the landers, letting the suit do most of the work.
The waving human turned out to be a Catholic priest called Dorothy Chaum. Madeleine had met her before, subjective years ago. And inside one of the landers was another human, somebody she knew only by reputation.
It was Reid Malenfant. And he was indeed dying.
Malenfant was wasted. His head was cadaverous, the skull showing through thin, papery flesh, and his bald scalp was covered in liver spots.
Dorothy and Madeleine got Malenfant suited up and hauled him to Dorothy’s lander. In this gravity it was hard work, despite their suits’ multipliers. But Dorothy’s lander had a more comprehensive med facility than Madeleine’s. Malenfant had nothing at all, save what the Gaijin had been able to provide.
Malenfant had grown old and had sunk into himself, like a tide going out, an ocean receding. He had managed to keep himself alive a good few years. But his equipment wasn’t sufficient anymore — and the Gaijin he traveled with sure didn’t know enough about human biology to tinker. Not only that, he was suffering from the Discontinuity.
When he had started to die, the Gaijin were confounded.
“So they sent for us,” Dorothy Chaum said, marveling. “They sent signals out through the gateway links.”
“How did they keep him alive so long?”
“They didn’t. They just preserved him. They bounced his signal around the Saddle Point network, never making him corporeal for more than a few seconds at a time…”
Madeleine studied Malenfant. Had he been aware, as he passed through one blue-flash gateway transition after another, of the light-years and decades passing in seconds?
Malenfant woke up while they were bed-bathing him. Stripped, washed, and immersed in a med tank, he looked Madeleine in the eyes. “Are you
“I’m the best you’re going to find, pal.”
But now he was staring at Chaum, the diagrammatic white collar around her neck. “What is this, the last rites?” He tried to struggle upright, on arms as thin as toothpicks.
Madeleine shoved him back. “It will be if you don’t cooperate.”
He swiveled that gaunt head. “Where’s my suit?”
Dorothy frowned, and pointed to the Gaijin-manufactured envelope they’d bundled up in one corner. “Over there.”
“No,” he whispered. “My
It turned out he meant his old NASA-era Shuttle EMU, a disgusting old piece of kit almost as far beyond its design limits as Malenfant himself. He wouldn’t relax until Madeleine got suited up, went across to the lander that had brought him here, and retrieved the EMU for him. Then again, it was the only possession he had in the world, or worlds. She could understand how he felt.
He scrabbled in its pockets until he found a faded, much folded photograph, of a smiling woman on a beach.
When they had him in the tank, Madeleine spent a little time working on that gruesome old suit. She could fix the wiring shorts and the cooling-garment tubing leaks, polish out the scratches on the bubble helmet, patch the fabric. But she couldn’t make it absolutely clean again; the dust of many worlds was ingrained too deep into the fabric. And she couldn’t wash out the stink of Malenfant.
