nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometers of water. The colonists were able to fix the otec, clunky machinery through it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.
After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.
It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.
Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smocklike affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colors — red, blue, green — a contrast to the drab environment.
He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.
He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How
His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name — and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. “You’re the
“Yes.”
“How very strange. Of course we have records.” He smiled. “There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.”
“I was there for the live show, remember.”
“Yes. You must have fascinating stories.” He didn’t sound all that fascinated, though, to Madeleine; it seemed clear he’d rather show her the records his family had cherished than hear her testimony from history. The past was a thing to own, to lock away in boxes and archives, not to explore.
It wasn’t the first time she had encountered such a reaction.
He made her a meal in his home, which was a multichamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn’t based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.
Adamm’s clothes were made from seaweed — or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silklike threads and was the basis of virtually all the colonists’ clothing and other fabric, as well as products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.
They talked tentatively while they ate.
Adamm made a minor living making pearl artifacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snufflike powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.
Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm’s home, and he was used to its conditions.
Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low-gravity environment of Triton, and with antiaging mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony’s life support. “We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity…”
The biosphere was just too small.
Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.
He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.
She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.
After the meal, they took a walk.
He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed, and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune’s faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.
She said, “I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is… eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earthlike.”
She glimpsed hostility on his face.
“Travelers like you have returned before,” he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. “What does it matter if Triton is
The little clash depressed her. Of course he’s right, she thought; Earth must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations… We humans just can’t maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.
While the Gaijin sail on.
As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.
She grabbed Adamm’s hand; he recoiled from her touch. “There. Did you see that?”
There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. “It’s not just a light in the sky,” she said defensively. “It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus—”
“This is your war?” Adamm asked reluctantly.
“Adamm, the war isn’t mine. But it is
A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth — something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry that was high-pitched and complex, like a door creaking.
Then it flipped backward and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.
“Believe me, it isn’t. Adamm, I’m going to need your help. The headman won’t see me. You have to help me convince people.”
He laughed, not unkindly. He pointed down to the black water. “Start with them.”
“Who?”
“The Flips. Try convincing them. They’re people too.”
She peered into the water, stunned.
He walked away. She had no choice but to follow.
The headman’s office loaned her a hard-shelled suit, full of smart stuff and heating elements. She descended into the water, from a bay on the outskirts of the bubble city, through a hole neatly cut in the ice.
She fell slowly, in deepening darkness. She moved around experimentally. She couldn’t feel the cold, and the water pressure here on this low-gravity moon was pretty low, but the water resisted her movements. When the hole in the ice was just a pinpoint of blue light above her, she turned on her helmet lamps. The beams penetrated only a few meters into the murk. She ran a quick visual check of her systems and glanced upward to see her tether coiling reassuringly up through the water, her physical link to the world of air and light above.
Deep-sea diving on Triton. She’d never liked swimming, even on a real planet.
She was alone. The colonists didn’t take to the water much. Their deep ocean was just a resource, a mine, not a place to explore, much less play.
Something wriggled past her faceplate.
She recoiled. Her chin jammed against her air inlet, and there was a sudden decrease in pressure; her ears popped alarmingly.
She calmed herself down. It had only been a fish. She didn’t recognize the species — a native Earth type, or gen-enged for this peculiar environment?
She fell faster.
The murky dust grew thicker. It was probably organic debris, she had been warned: decomposed body parts, drifting down to the deep ocean floor. More critters and plants drifted up past her. There were strands of seaweed, what looked like tiny shrimp, more fish of a variety of shapes and sizes, even what appeared to be a sea horse.
There was a whole biosphere down here, gen-enged from Earth life. There was little photosynthesis: not enough sunlight for that. Most of the energy for life here came from the heat of Triton’s interior. So the food chain was anchored in communities of exotic bugs clustered around smoking, mineral-laden vents, cracks in the ocean floor hundreds of kilometers from the light.
…She felt it before she could see it, as there was a sudden and unexpected nuzzling at her legs, soft, warm, curious. She twisted around in the water, tether looping.
It was like a dolphin, yes: a small dolphin, sleek body a couple of meters long, streamlined fur pure white, powerful flukesand stubby fins. But
This was a human, of course: or rather, a posthuman, gen-enged for this environment, the true, deep heart of Triton, far beneath the cold, attenuated huddles of the surface.
He swum around her smoothly, brushing her legs, feet, arms, chest. She heard a pulsing click, perhaps some form of echo sounding…
He rolled on his back.
Enough analysis, Madeleine.
Without thinking, she reached out with her gloved hand and scratched his corrugated, gunmetal-gray belly. She could feel nothing of the texture of his fur. But the clicks and pops he made deepened, seeming to denote satisfaction.
“Can you hear me? Can you understand?” Are you a Roach too, she thought, some remote, metamorphosed child of Ben and Lena?
For reply he wriggled away and floated there, just out of her reach.
She had to let herself drift a little deeper to touch him again. He let her stroke him a couple more minutes, then wriggled away again. And she had to descend farther, reach out again.
And again, and again.
He’s testing me, she realized slowly. Playing some game with me. Psychology. Still human enough for that.
And, she saw by the swelling of his impressive penis, it was giving him a kick.
She rose up a little, folded her arms.
When he saw she wasn’t playing anymore, he rolled on his front and his fins beat at the water, as if in frustration. But then he quickly forgave her and began rolling around her legs, nuzzling and butting.
More shadows in the water, she saw now: two, three, four Flips. They clustered around her curiously. She wondered if her first companion had called to them, in some manner she couldn’t detect. She tried not to flinch as their powerful bodies brushed the equipment that kept her alive; they showed no malevolence, only a kind of affectionate curiosity, and her gear was surely designed
