Space

There was a rumbling roll of a kettle drum, and the gate was drawn aside; they proceeded — chiefs, soldiers, peasants, and interstellar travelers — into a complex of courtyards.

There was a wide avenue inside the fence, and at the fence’s four corners those spectacular fountains thrust up into the air, rising fifteen meters or more. The water emerged from crude clay piping that snaked into the ground beneath the palace. Maybe there were pumps buried in the hillside.

Malenfant approached the nearest fountain. He reached out to touch the water. Christ, it was hot, so hot it almost scalded his fingers. Nemoto pulled his arm back. Her hand on his was leathery and warm.

The drums sounded again. They passed through courtyard after courtyard, until finally they stood in front of the palace itself.

It was only a grass hut. But it was tall and spacious, full of light and air. Malenfant, who had once visited the White House, had been in worse government buildings.

The heart of the palace was a reception room. This was a narrow hall some twenty meters long, the ceiling of which was supported by two rows of pillars. The aisles were filled with dignitaries and officers. At each pillar stood one of the Kabaka’s guards, wearing a long red mantle, white trousers, black blouse, and a white turban ornamented with monkey skin. All were armed with spears. But there was no throne there, nor Mtesa himself. Instead there was only what Malenfant took to be a well, a rectangular pit in the floor.

Malenfant, Nemoto, and the rest had to sit in rows before the open pit.

Drums clattered, and puffs of steam came venting up from the well mouth, followed by a grinding, mechanical noise. A platform rose up out of the well, smoothly enough. Once again, Malenfant wondered where the energy for these stunts came from. The platform carried a throne — a seat like an office chair — on which sat the lean figure of Mtesa himself. Mtesa’s head was clean-shaven and covered with a fez; his features were smooth, polished and without a wrinkle, and he might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five. His big, lustrous eyes gave him a strange beauty, and Malenfant wondered if there was Upright blood in there. Mtesa was sweating, his robes a little rumpled, but was grinning hugely.

Nemoto, as the katekiro, and Mtesa’s vizier and scribes all came forward to kneel at his feet. Some kissed the palms and backs of his hands; others prostrated themselves on the ground. Malenfant found it very strange to watch Nemoto do this.

Through all this, a girl stood at Mtesa’s elbow. She was tall, dressed in white, her hair dark, but she had the broad neck and downy golden fur of an Upright. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She moved like a cat, and — thought Reid Malenfant, dried-up hundred-year-old star voyager — she was sexy as all hell. But she looked troubled, like a child with a guilty conscience.

The main business of the afternoon was a bunch of petitioners and embassies, each of which Mtesa handled with efficiency — and, when he was displeased, with brutality. In such cases the “Lords of the Cord” were called forward: big beefy guards whose job was to drag away the source of Mtesa’s anger by ropes about the neck. It was, Malenfant thought, a striking management technique.

Nemoto was heavily involved in all this: the presentation of cases and evidence, the delivery of the verdict. And each sentencing was preceded by Nemoto placing a dry kiss on the cheek of the terrified victim — a kiss of death, Malenfant thought with a shudder, planted by a thousand-year-old woman.

At last Mtesa turned to Malenfant. Through an interpreter, a dried-up little courtier, the Kabaka asked questions. He showed a childlike curiosity about Malenfant’s story: where and when he had been born, the places he had seen in his travels.

After a while, Malenfant started to enjoy the occasion. For the first time in a thousand years, Reid Malenfant had found somebody who actually wanted to hear his anecdotes about the early days of the U.S. space program.

Mtesa, it turned out, knew all about the Gaijin, and Saddle Point gateways, and, roughly speaking, the dispersal of humanity over the last thousand years. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of Malenfant having been born a millennium ago. But these were abstractions to him, since the Gaijin didn’t intervene in affairs on Earth — not overtly anyhow — and Mtesa was more interested in what profit he could make out of this windfall.

Malenfant reminded himself that people were most preoccupied by their own slice of history; Mtesa was a man of his time, which had nothing to do with Malenfant’s. Still, Malenfant wondered how many more generations would pass before only the kings and courtiers knew the true story of mankind, while everyone else subsided to flat-Earth ignorance and started worshiping Gaijin flower- ships as gods in the sky.

Mtesa offered Malenfant various gifts and an invitation to stay as long as he wished, then dismissed him.

Nemoto got away from Malenfant as soon as she could.

That evening, alone in his villa, Malenfant started to feel ill.

He couldn’t keep down his food. He felt as if he was running a temperature. And his hand hurt: there was a burning sensation, deep in the flesh, where the fountain water had splashed him.

In the bubble helmet of his EMU, he studied his reflection. He didn’t look so bad. A little glassy about the eyes, perhaps. Maybe it was the food.

He went to bed early and tried to forget about it.

He pursued Nemoto. He tried everything he could think of to break through to her.

Eventually, with every evidence of reluctance, Nemoto agreed to spend a little time with Malenfant. She came to his hut, and they sat on the broad, wood-floored veranda, by the light of a small oil lamp and of the blue Moon.

She brought with her a Buddha, a squat, ugly carving. It was made, she said, of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii: Moon rock, worn smooth by time. The wizened little Japanese looked up at the blue-green Moon. “And now the regolith is buried under meters of dirt, with fat lunar-gravity-evolved earthworms crawling through it. We have survived to see strange times, Malenfant.”

“Yeah.”

They talked, but Nemoto was no cicerone. The only way he could get any information out of her was to let her rehearse her obsession with the Gaijin — not to mention her former employers, Nishizaki Heavy Industries, whom she thought had betrayed the human species.

He was astonished to find she’d traveled here, through a thousand years of history, the long way around: not by skipping from era to era as he and the other Saddle Point travelers had done, but simply by not dying. She gave him no indication of what technology she had used to exceed so greatly the usual human life span.

A thousand years of consciousness: no doubt this was dwarfed by Cassiopeia and her mechanical sisters, but such a span seemed unbearable on a human scale. He wondered how well Nemoto could retrieve the memories of her own deep past, of her first meeting with him on the Moon, for instance; perhaps she had been forced to resort to technology to reorder and optimize her immense recollections. And, listening to Nemoto, he wondered how much of her sanity, her personality, had survived this long ordeal of life. She hinted at dark periods, slumps into poverty and powerlessness, even a period — centuries long — when she had lived as a recluse on the Farside of the Moon.

However she had been damaged by time, though, she had retained one thing: her crystal-clear enmity of the Gaijin, and the ETs who were following them.

“When I found the Gaijin I imagined we were destined fora thousand-year war. But now a thousand years have elapsed, and the war continues. Malenfant, when I still had influence, I struggled to restrict the Gaijin. I recruited the people called the Yolgnu. I established Kasyapa Township—”

“On Triton.”

“Yes. It was a beachhead, to keep the Gaijin from expanding their industrial activities in the outer system. I failed in that purpose. Now there are only a handful of human settlements beyond the Earth. There is a colony on Mercury, huddling close to the Sun beyond the reach of the Gaijin… If it survives, perhaps that will be our final home. For the Gaijin are here. ”

A moth was beating against the lamp. She reached up and grabbed the insect in one gnarled hand. She showed the crushed fragments to Malenfant.

Flakes of mica wing. The sparkle of plastic. A smear of what looked like fine engine oil.

“Gaijin,” Nemoto said. “They are here, Malenfant. They are everywhere, meddling, building. And worse are following.” She pointed up to the stars, in a sky made muddy with light by the low Moon. He could pick out Orion, just. “You must have seen the novae.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Yes. There has been a rash of novae, of minor stellar explosions, like an infection spreading along the spiral arm. It has been proceeding for centuries.”

“My God.”

She smiled grimly. “I’ve missed you, Malenfant. You immediately see implications. This is deliberate, of course, a strategy of some intelligence. Somebody is setting off the stars, exploding them like firecrackers. The stars selected are like the Sun — more or less. We have seen the disruption of Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Castor is a binary of two A-class stars some forty-five light-years away, Pollux a K-class thirty-five light-years away. Then came Procyon, an F-class eleven light-years away, and, more recently Sirius—”

“Just nine light-years away.”

“Yes.”

“Why would anybody blow up stars?”

She shrugged. “To mine them of raw materials. Perhaps to launch a fleet of solar-sail starships. Who knows? I call them the Crackers,” she said darkly. “Appropriate, don’t you think? The spread seems to have been patchy, diffuse.”

“But they are coming this way.”

“Yes. They are coming this way.”

“Perhaps the Gaijin will defend us.”

She snorted. “The Gaijin pursue their own interest. We are incidental, just another victim species a few decades or centuries behind the general development, about to be burned up in an interstellar war between rapacious colonists.”

Just as Malenfant had seen among the stars, over and over. And now it was happening here.

But there was still much mystery, he thought. There was still the question of the reboot, the greater cataclysm that seemed poised to sweep over the Galaxy and all its squabbling species.

What were the Gaijin really up to, here in the Solar System? Nemoto’s blunt antagonism seemed simplistic to Malenfant, who had come to know the Gaijin better. They were hardly humanity’s friends, but neither were they mortal enemies. They were just Gaijin, following their own star.

But Nemoto was still talking, resigned, fatalistic. “I am an old woman. I was already an old woman a thousand years ago. All I can do now is survive, here, in this absurd little kingdom…”

Maybe. But, he reflected, if she’d chosen to retire, she could have done that anywhere. She didn’t have to come here, to this dismal feudal empire, and serve its puffed-up ruler. The grassy metropolis — and the radiation signature, that trace of technology — had drawn her here, just like himself.

Testing her, he said, “I have a functioning pressure suit.”

She scarcely moved, as if trying to mask her reaction to that. She was like a statue, some greater Moon-rock Buddha herself.

There is, he realized, something she isn’t telling me — something significant.

He was woken before dawn.

De Bonneville’s ruined face loomed over him like a black moon, the sweet stink of pombe on his breath. “Malenfant. Come. They’re hunting.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”