Space

to survive encounters like this.

Now one of them — her first friend maybe, impossible to say — began to emit a new kind of sound. It was a kind of whistle, much purer than the echo clicks or the squeaky-door groans she had heard before.

Another joined in, making a whistle that wavered a bit but soon settled on the same pitch as the first. And now she heard a pulsing, overlaid on their simple pure-tone singing. Beats, she thought, the interference of one tone with another.

The other Flips joined in, singing their own notes, producing more beats. As a piece of music it was simple, just a cluster of pure tones in straightforward harmony with each other. But the beats were more complex, an elusive pattern of pulses that shifted, hopping from one frequency to another, sometimes too rapidly for her to follow.

On a whim she activated a feed to her concrete cave room, up in the surface colony, and let the translator suite record the singing. Then she closed her eyes and let herself drift, immersed in song, oblivious even to the gentle touch of the Flips as they swam around her.

The Flips scattered, suddenly, as if in panic, disappearing into the gloom, leaving her alone. She felt shocked, oddly bereft; without the song, the world seemed empty.

But now she heard a new noise: a deep regular thrumming. Something was approaching through the water ahead of her, something massive, a texture that spanned the ocean.

It was a net.

She paced back and forth in Adamm’s lounge. “What kind of people are you? Those Flips are your—”

“Children?” He smiled, languid, sipping a kind of wine whose principal ingredient was seaweed. “Cousins? Brothers, sisters? Don’t be absurd. They are a different species. They became that way by choice. When they first went into the sea, they took tools, ways of extracting metal. They discarded it all, bit by bit. They even discarded their hands, and their eyes, everything that makes us human. They chose to go back, you see, back to… mindlessness. It was ideological.”

She wondered how much, if any, of that was true. “But to hunt them down—”

He studied her curiously. “Do you imagine we eat them? You don’t think much of us, do you? The Flips are just a pest. They disrupt the ecology. They interfere with the city’s systems, the filter valves for instance…”

Perhaps, she thought.

The translator had analyzed the Flips’ singing.

With no referents, it was impossible to provide a one-to-one translation. But it was obvious the song was full of structure. The suite identified patterns in the choice of frequencies, in the way the beats were manipulated, in their spacing and timing and intonation and pitch… The suite estimated that an hour of such singing could encode a million bits, which was, for comparison, about the information content of Homer’s Odyssey.

The Flips couldn’t match the richness of the whale song of Earth. Not yet. A few more centuries, she thought, and they’d have it.

So the Song went on after all, here in this watery desert, a place even more elemental than the Outback.

Adamm was still talking. “…And you needn’t imagine they are some kind of cute pet. Some of them have turned predatory, you know. Ecological niches tend to be filled… They consume each other. Look, they’re just Flips. They don’t matter.”

“And nor did your ancestors, in white Australia.”

His face hardened. “You created this world, I suppose, with your stunts, firing moons back and forth. And now you want to destroy it, evacuate thousands of people.” He smiled. “History remembers you as a meddler. Grandiose. Ideas above your capabilities.” But even as he spoke he seemed distant, as if unable to believe he was challenging this historical figure — as if he were facing down Columbus, or Julius Caesar. He gazed out at interstellar darkness, the edge of the system. “If these aliens are as powerful as you claim, maybe we should just accept what’s going to happen. Like death. You can’t fight that.”

She growled. “No, but you can put it off.” She stood. “I’m not interested in your opinion of me, or your analysis. I’m going to see the headman, whether she likes it or not. I’ll do what I can to arrange evacuation to the inner system for everybody who wants it. Even the Flips.”

He eyed her, saying nothing; somehow she sensed this remote grandson of long-dead Ben and Lena wasn’t going anywhere, with or without her.

“Good-bye, Adamm.”

Good-bye, good-bye.

Chapter 30 Refuge

The Gaijin flower-ship soared on a fast, efficient, powered trajectory into the crowded heart of the Solar System. The Sun grew brighter, swamping the subtleties of the star-laden sky, its glaring light more and more the dominant presence in the universe.

Madeleine felt an unreasonable, illogical sense of claustrophobia. There were no walls here, and there was room for whole planets to swim through the dark; and yet this place felt oppressive, closed in, like the heart of a city. She spent much time with the lander’s windows opaqued against the yellow-white glare, drifting beneath a cool, austere virtual Neptune.

The Gaijin refused to carry Madeleine any closer to the Sun than the orbit of Earth. She was going to have to proceed on to Mercury in the cramped confines of a lander designed primarily for orbit-to-ground hops.

The few hundred refugees from Triton who had followed her back into the heart of the system would have to endure the same rigors. The transfer into the landers was ill-tempered, chaotic.

It had proved impossible to communicate to the deep-ocean aquatics the need to evacuate. So she had been forced to leave them behind, those dolphinlike posthumans, abandoning them to whatever mysterious fate awaited them, without ever even knowing if they understood what was happening to them.

Just as, perhaps, the retreating Gaijin wondered of her.

As she watched the flower-ship sail away back into the outer darkness, she felt an entirely unexpected pang of loneliness, of abandonment.

She’d always suspected that Malenfant’s habit of giving his Gaijin companion a name — of treating Cassiopeia as some analog of a human individual — was just anthropomorphism, sloppy sentimentality. But the fact was she actually liked these aloof, stately, rational Gaijin a lot more than she liked some humans — notably the racist-type surface colonists she had encountered on Triton. The Gaijin were ancient, much-traveled, had endured experiences unimaginable to most humans; to them, a single, short-lived human and her concerns must seem as evanescent, as meaningless — and yet perhaps as beautiful — as the curl of a thread of smoke, the splash of a single raindrop.

At last, ten days after the Gaijin had left her, planet Mercury sailed into view. She was approaching at an angle from the night side, so to her it was a bony crescent against the black, slowly opening up, its cratering apparent even from a great distance.

She slid into orbit and was held there while an electronic bureaucracy — run by a governing body called the Coalition — processed her requests to land, machines separated by centuries of technical and social development seeking a way to speak to each other.

Mercury, turning beneath her, was like the Moon’s elder brother, just a ball of rock with a pale, thickly cratered surface. But there was no Mercury equivalent of the Moon’s great maria; whatever process had formed those great lunar seas of frozen lava hadn’t operated here. And there were features unlike anything on the Moon: zones of crumpling, ridges and folds and cracks like the wrinkled skin of a dried tomato, as if the planet had shrunk after its formation.

The stand-out feature was one immense impact basin, maybe thirty degrees north of the equator. She sailed over a ragged ring of mountains — not a simple rim, but a structure, with the tallest mountains innermost, and lower foothills farther out. Inside the ring there was a relatively smooth floor scarred by ridges, folds, and rifts that followed roughly concentric patterns, like the glaze on an old dinner plate. It was a fantastic sight, a basin that took her lander long minutes to skim over on its first approach pass, circles of mountains big enough to neatly encompass the Great Lakes.

And, in the deep shadows right at the huge crater’s heart, she saw lights, a hint of order, buildings and tracks. It was a human settlement, here in the deepest scar on the most inhospitable planet in the Solar System. She ought to have been uplifted by the spectacle. But that tiny spark in the midst of such ferocious desolation seemed merely absurd.

There was a lot of traffic in the sky.

They were human ships. Most of them were driven by solar sails, filmy and beautiful, wispy shapes that tacked against Mercury’s impassive rocky face, the slow evolution of their forms betraying the intelligent control that guided them. The ships rode the hail of photons that came from the huge nearby Sun, a much more effective means of transportation here than at Earth’s orbit and beyond.

It was immediately obvious that there were more ships arriving than leaving. But then there was no other place for humans to go, here in the Solar System of the year A.D. 3793; Mercury was a sink of people, not a source.

On the far side of Mercury she saw a type of landscape she’d never seen before: broken up, chaotic, almost shattered. She worked out that it was at the exact antipode of that giant impact structure, the target of converging spherical shock waves that must have traveled around the world; rock-smashing energies had focused here and made the land flex and crumble and boil.

Once Madeleine had hurled moons around the outer Solar System. Now she felt awed, humbled, by the evidence of such huge forces. Overwhelmed by a sense of impotence.

She was brought to land near the main human settlement. This was in a wide crater called Chao Meng-Fu, another giant impact structure, this one almost covering the south pole.

The gravity startled her with its strength, around twice that on the Moon. Strange for such a small planet, really little larger than the Moon; Mercury was very dense, another Cannonball.

Madeleine suited up. It was straightforward; through the centuries, in contrast to comms units and coffee machines, she’d found that life-critical equipment like pressure suits and air locks remained easy to operate, its operation obvious.

She stepped out of the tractor. Once again I set foot on a new world, she thought. Do I hold the record?

Within Chao Meng-Fu there were power plants and automated strip-mining robots. The surface structures cowered in rim mountain shadows, avoiding the Sun, which glared down for 176 Earth days at a time — an unexpected number; Mercury’s “day” was fixed, by tidal effects, as two-thirds of the little planet’s 88-day year, and so its calendar was a complex clockwork.

She looked up, toward the Sun, which was low on the horizon. Filters in her helmet blocked out the disc of the Sun itself, but that disc was three times as large as Earth’s Sun, a bloated monster.

She saw no humans above ground, none at all.

Her arrival at Chao City was processed by crude virtuals. These software robots had been designed to handle the arrival of speakers of incomprehensible languages from all over the Solar System. Their humanity smoothed out, they guided her wordlessly with simple mime and gesture. Chao City was a warren of corridors and tunnels hastily cut out of the bedrock. It was crowded with a dozen diverse races, a place full of suspicion and territoriality.

She was assigned a poky room, another cave like the one she’d endured on Triton — though this time, at least, carved from familiar silicate rock rather than water ice. How strange it was that humans, on whatever world they settled from one end of the Solar System to the other, were driven to burrow into the ground like moles.