Space

“Simple. In principle. You set a chain of powerful particle accelerators in orbit around your target star. They create currents of charged particles, which set up a powerful magnetic field, caging the star — which can then be manipulated.”

“…Ah. But you need a resource base to manufacture those thousands, millions of machines. And a place to make your new generation of solar sailing boats.”

“Yes. Madeleine, here in the Solar System, what would be the ideal location for such a mine?”

A rocky world orbiting conveniently close to the central star itself. A big fat core of iron and nickel just begging to be dug out and broken up and exploited, without even an awkward rocky shell to cut through…

“Mercury,” Madeleine whispered. “What do we do? Do we have to evacuate?”

“Where to?” Dorothy said, comparatively gently. “Meacher, remember where you are. We’ve already lost the Solar System. This is the last bolthole. All we can do is dig deep, deep down, as deep as possible.”

Something about her emphasis on those words made Madeleine look hard at Dorothy, but her face remained obscured.

“What are you doing here, Dorothy? You’re planning something, aren’t you?” Her mind raced. “Some way of striking back at the Crackers — is that what this is about? Are you working with Nemoto?”

But Dorothy evaded the question. “What can we do? The Crackers have already driven off the Gaijin, a species much older and wiser and more powerful than us. We’re just vermin infesting a piece of prime real estate.”

“If you believe we’re vermin, you really have lost your faith,” Madeleine said coldly.

Dorothy laughed. “Compared to the Gaijin, even the Crackers, what other word would you use?” She peered up at the sky, her face obscured by scuffed glass. “Remember, Madeleine. Tell them to dig deep. That’s vital. As deep as they can…”

She went back to Carl ap Przibram to discuss the issue of the Aborigines. Interstellar war or not, they still had no other place to go.

“Please be straightforward with me. I appreciate you’re trying to help. I don’t want to offend you, or imply—”

“ — that I’m some kind of immoral bastard,” he said tightly.

The archaic term surprised her. She wondered what thirty-eighth-century oath lay on the other side of the chattering translators.

“This isn’t an easy job,” he said. “People always find it hard to accept what I have to tell them.”

“I sympathize. But I need you to help me. I’m a long way from home — from my time. It’s hard for me to understand what’s happening here, to progress the issue.” She pointed to the ceiling. “There are two hundred people up there. They’ve come all the way in from Triton, the edge of the Solar System. They have absolutely no place to go. They are completely dependent, refugees.”

“We are all refugees.”

She grunted. “That’s the standard mantra here, isn’t it?”

He frowned at her. “But it’s true. And I don’t know if you understand how significant that is. I haven’t met a traveler before, Madeleine Meacher. But I’ve read about your kind.”

“My kind?”

“You were born on Earth, weren’t you? At a time when there were no colonies beyond the home planet.”

“Not quite true—”

“You are accustomed to think of us, the space dwellers, as exotic beings, somehow beyond the humanity you grew up with. But it isn’t like that. My home society, on Vesta, was fifteen centuries old. My ancestors spent all that time making the asteroid habitable. Centuries living in tunnels and lava tubes and caves, cowering from radiation, knowing that a single mistake could kill everything they cared about… We are a deeply conservative people, Madeleine Meacher. We are not used to travel. We are not world builders. We, too, are a long way from home.”

“You got here first,” Madeleine said. “And now you’re driving everybody else off.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t like that. If not for us, this — a habitable corner of Mercury — wouldn’t be here at all.”

She stood up. “I know you’ll do your job, Carl ap Przibram.”

He nodded. “I appreciate your courtesy. But you understand that doesn’t guarantee I will be able to let your party land here. If we cannot feed them…” He steepled his long fingers. “In the long run,” he said, “it may make no difference anyhow. Do you see that?”

If the Crackers win, if they come here. That’s what he means.

He studied her face, as if pleading for help, for understanding.

Everybody does his best, she thought bleakly. How little it all means.

Chapter 31 Endgame

In the final months, events unfolded with shocking rapidity. The great spherical fleet of Cracker vessels sailed inward — through the huge empty orbits of the outer planets, past abandoned asteroids, at last into the hot deep heart of the system.

One by one, all over the system, beacons were extinguished: on Triton, the asteroids, Mars, human stories concluded without witness, in the cold and dark.

The data miners found Nemoto — or, Madeleine thought, perhaps she consented to be found.

It turned out Nemoto had shunned the underground colonies. She was working on the surface, in an abandoned science base in a big, smooth-floored crater called Bach, some thousand kilometers north of Chao City.

Madeleine used the monorail to get to Bach. The rail was still functioning, for now; the encroaching Cracker ships had yet to interfere materially with Mercury in any way. Nevertheless there were no humans operating on the surface of Mercury, nobody amid the blindly toiling robots, diggers, and scrapers. And everywhere, tended by the robots or not, Madeleine saw the gleam of solar- sail flowers.

In the shade of an eroded-smooth crater wall, Nemoto was toiling at a plain of tilled regolith. Here, one of the glass-leafed arrays had spread out over the heat-shattered soil. Nemoto was hunched over, monklike, a slow patient figure redolent of age, tending her plants of glass and light.

The Sun was higher in the sky at this more northerly latitude, a ferocious ball, and Madeleine’s suit, gleaming silver, warned her frequently of excessive temperatures.

“Nemoto—”

Nemoto straightened up stiffly. She silenced Madeleine with a gesture, beckoned for her to come deeper into the shade, and pointed upward.

Madeleine lifted her visor. Gradually, as her eyes adapted, the stars came out. The sky’s geography was swamped, in one corner, by the extensive glare of the Sun’s corona.

But the stars were just a backdrop to a crowd of ships.

They were all around Mercury now, spread out through three-dimensional space like a great receding cloud of dragonflies frozen in flight. Loose clusters of them already orbited the planet, looping east and west, north and south, cupping the light. And farther out there was a ragged swarm still on the way, reaching back to the hidden Sun, around which these misty invaders had sailed.

Their filmy, silvery wings were caught folded or twisted, in the act of shifting better to catch the Sun’s light. The spread of those gauzy wings was huge, some of them thousands of kilometers across. These were no trivial inner-system skimmers, as humans had built, made to sail in the dense light winds close to the Sun; these were giant interstellar schooners, capable of traveling across light-years, through spaces where the brightest, largest star was reduced to a point.

Not dragonflies, she thought. Locusts. For not one of those ships was human, Madeleine knew, or even Gaijin. Nothing but Crackers.

“It’s remarkable to watch them,” Nemoto breathed. “I mean, over hours or days. Simply to stand here and watch. You can see them deploying their sails, you know. The sunlight pushes outward from the Sun, of course. But they sail in toward the Sun by tacking into the light: they lose a little orbital velocity, and then simply fall inward. But sailing ships that size are slow to maneuver. They must have been plotting their courses, here to Mercury, all the way in from the Oort cloud.”

“I wonder what the sails are made of,” Madeleine said.

Nemoto grunted. “Nothing we have ever been capable of. Maybe the Gaijin would know. Only diamond fiber would be strong enough for the rigging. And as for the sails, the best we can do is aluminized spider silk. Much too thick and heavy for ships of that size. Perhaps they grow the sails by some kind of vacuum deposition, molecule by molecule. Or perhaps they are masters of nanotech.”

“They really are coming, aren’t they, Nemoto?”

Nemoto turned, face hidden. “Of course they are. We are both too old for illusion, Meacher. They are wasps around a honey pot, which is Mercury’s fat iron core.”

Together, they walked around the spreading array, glass flowers that sparkled with the light of stars and ET ships.

Madeleine tried to talk to Nemoto, to draw her out. After all, their acquaintance — never friendship — went back across sixteen hundred years, to that steamy office in Kourou, a tank of spinning Chaera on the pre-Paulis Moon. But Nemoto wouldn’t talk of her life, her past: she would talk of nothing but the great issues of the day, Mercury and the Crackers and the great ET colonization pulse all around them, the huge and impersonal.

Madeleine wondered if that was normal.

But there was nothing normal about a woman who had lived through seventeen centuries, for God’s sake. Nemoto was probably the oldest human being who had ever lived; to survive, Nemoto must have put herself through endless reengineering, of both body and mind. And, unlike the lonely star travelers, she had lived through all those years on worlds full of people: Earth, the Moon, Mercury. Her biography must run like an unbroken thread through the tangled tapestry of a millennium and a half of human history.

But Madeleine truthfully knew little of this ancient, enigmatic woman. Had she ever married, ever fallen in love? Had she ever had children? And if so, were they alive — or had she outlived generation after generation of descendants? Perhaps nobody knew, nobody but Nemoto herself. And Nemoto would talk of none of this, refused to be drawn as she tended her plants of glass.

But in her slow-moving, aged way, she seemed focused, Madeleine thought. Determined, vigorous. Almost happy. As if she had a mission.

Madeleine decided to challenge her.

She walked among the glassy leaves. She bent, awkwardly, and picked up a glimmering leaf; it broke away easily. It was very fine, fragile. When she crushed it carelessly, it crumbled.

Nemoto made a small move toward her, a silent admonition.

Madeleine dropped the leaf carefully. “I’ve been reading up,” she said.

“You have?”