"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 22 Triton Dreamtime

Even before Neptune showed a disc, Madeleine could see that it was blue, and Triton white. Blue planet, white moon, swimming mistily out of the huge slow-moving dark like exotic deep-sea fish.

Neptune swelled into a disc, made almost full by the pinpoint Sun behind her. The looming planet was dim, at first just a faintly blue hole against the stars, then gradually, as her eyes dark-adapted, filling with misty detail, becoming a ball of subtle blue and violet, visibly structured. Bands of darker blue girdled the planet, following lines of latitude. There were big storm systems, swirling knots like Jupiter’s red spot. And there were thin stripes of white, higher clouds far above the blue, clouds that formed and dissipated within a few hours, surprisingly rapidly. Sometimes, when the angle of the Sun was right, she could see those high clouds casting shadows on the deeper layers beneath.

She was a long way from home.

It was impossible even to grasp the immensities of scale here. The Sun showed as no more than an intense star, bright enough to cast shadows, gray but razor sharp. The Sun’s gravity grip was so loosened that Neptune took more than a hundred times as long as Earth to complete a single orbit. And Neptune was surrounded by emptiness more than ten times wider than Earth’s orbit around the Sun — an emptiness, indeed, that could have contained the whole of Jupiter’s orbit.

Out here, in the stillness and cold and dark, the worlds that had spawned were not like Earth. Here the planets had grown immense, misty, stuffed with light elements like hydrogen and helium that had boiled away from the hot, busy inner worlds. So Neptune’s rocky core was buried beneath thick layers of opaque gas; the blue was of methane, not water; there were no continents or ice caps here.

But she had not expected that Neptune would be so stunningly Earthlike. She felt tugs of nostalgic longing; for Earth itself, of course, was no longer blue, but a diseased white: the white of encroaching ice.

On the last day of its long flight, Gurrutu, engines blazing, swept around the limb of Neptune. The maneuver occurred in complete silence, and as Madeleine watched the huge world swim past her, it was as if she were flying through some cold, dark, gigantic cathedral.

And there was Triton, already bright and growing brighter, a pink-white pearl floating in emptiness.

The final approach to Triton was a challenge for the navigation routines. Triton, uniquely among the Solar System’s larger moons, orbited Neptune in a retrograde manner, opposite to the spin of Neptune itself. And Triton’s orbit was severely pitched up, some twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was thought these eccentricities of Triton were a relic of its peculiar origin: It had once been an independent body, like Pluto, but had been captured by Neptune, perhaps by impact with another moon or by grazing Neptune’s atmosphere, a catastrophic event that had resulted in global melting before the moon had learned to endure its entrapment.

Gurrutu entered a looping elliptical orbit. Madeleine watched as a surface of crumpled, pink-streaked water ice rolled beneath the craft. Triton’s misty twilight was marked by a single, yellow, man-made beacon: at the site of Kasyapa Township, home to Ben Roach’s people. They were not alone in Triton orbit. Many emigrant transport ships, of the same design as Gurrutu, still circled here. Others had been driven into the surface, to be broken up for raw materials.

After a day, a small shuttle came up to meet them. Triton’s atmosphere, a wisp of nitrogen laced with hydrocarbons, was too thin to support any kind of aircraft; so the shuttle would descend from orbit standing on its rockets, as Apollo astronauts had once landed on the Moon.

As the lander swiveled, the icy ground opened out before her. It was white, laced with pink and, here and there, darker streaks, like wind-blown dust. It was crowded with detail, she saw, with ridges and clefts and pits in the ice, as if the skin of the planet had shriveled in some impossible heat.

The lander tipped up and fell sharply, entering the last phase of its descent routine. The horizon flattened out quickly, and detail exploded at her. She was descending into a region crisscrossed by shallow ridges, a parquetry of planes and pits in the ice. But there was evidence of human activity: two long straight furrows cut across the random geologic features, a pair of roadways as straight as any Roman road, neatly melted into the ice. And at their terminus, set at the center of one of the walled ice pits, she saw a small octagonal pad of what looked like concrete, a cluster of silvery tanks and other buildings nearby.

The final landing was gentle. Madeleine and Ben suited up and climbed out of the lander.

The plain around them was still, the fuel tanks and crude surface buildings pale and silent. Under her boots there was a crunch of frost overlaying a harder, whiter rock.

Not rock, she told herself. This was ice, water ice. She scraped at the ice with her boot. It was impenetrable, unyielding, and she failed to mark its surface; it was like a hard, compacted stone. Here, in the intense cold, ice played the part of silicate rocks on Earth. There was an elusive pink stain about the ice, almost too faint to see. Some kind of sunlight-processed organics, perhaps.

She took a step forward, two. She floated and hopped, moonwalk-style. In fact, she knew, Triton’s gravity was little more than half the strength of the Moon’s. But she was a big clumsy human with a poor gravity sense; to her body, Triton and Moon were both lumped together in a catch-all category called “weak gravity.”

She looked up, into a black sky. There was no sense of air above her, no scattering of the sunlight: only a deep, starry sky, as if seen from the high desert — but with a dominant bright pinprick at the center of it. The Sun was bright enough to cast shadows, but it was not like authentic sunlight, she thought, more like illumination by a very bright planet, like Venus. The land was a plain of pale white, delicate, a land of midnight stillness, its planes and folds seeming gauzy in the thin light. It seemed a creation of smoke or mist, not of rock-solid ice.

Now she tipped back and peered overhead, where Neptune hung in the sky. The planet appeared as large as fifteen of Earth’s full Moons, strung across the sky together. It was half-full, gaunt, almost spectral.

From the corner of her eye she saw movement: flakes of pure white, sparsely descending around her.

“Snow, on Triton?”

“I think it’s nitrogen,” Ben said.

Madeleine tried to catch a flake of nitrogen snow on her glove. She wondered how the crystals would differ from the water-ice snow of Earth. But the flakes were too elusive, too sparse, and they were soon gone.

Ben tapped her shoulder and pointed to another corner of the sky, closer to the horizon. There was what looked like a star, perhaps surrounded by a diffuse disc of light.

It was a Gaijin engineering convoy: alien ships, built of asteroid rock and ice, en route to Triton.

The refugee Yolgnu had established their home in the rim wall of a shallow, circular depression called Kasyapa Cavus. This was on the eastern edge of Bubembe Regio, a region of so-called cantaloupe terrain, the complex, parquetlike landscape of the type Madeleine had noticed during the landing. The Cavus had a smooth, bowl-like floor, easy to traverse. There were tractors here, whose big, gauzy, balloon tires seemed to have made no impression on the icy ground. Kasyapa Township was a system of branching caverns. The colonists had burrowed far into the ice-rock, ensuring that a thick layer of ice and spacecraft-hull metal shielded them from the radiation flux of Neptune’s magnetosphere and from the relic cosmic radiation of deep space.

She was given a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings — book chips, a few clothes, virtuals of an X-ray burster and a black-hole accretion ring — into the cabin. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place. The wall surface — Triton ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under Madeleine’s hand. After the cool spaces of the Neptune system, she found Kasyapa immediately claustrophobic.

Ben Roach was swallowed up by the family he had left behind, two whole new generations of nephews and nieces and grand-nephews and grand-nieces.

And here, of course, was Lena Roach. She had become a small, precise woman whose silences suggested great depths. She hadn’t seen her husband, Ben, for a hundred of her years, for most of her long life. But she had waited for him, built a home in the most unforgiving of environments.

It was immediately clear she still loved Ben, and he lovedher, despite the gulfs of time that separated them. Madeleine watched their calm, deep reunion with awe and envy. It was like grandmother greeting grandson, like wife meeting husband, complex, multilayered.

She explored fitfully, moodily.

It was obvious to her that the colony was failing.

The people were thin, their skins pale. Malnourished, they were specters in the dim sunlight. People moved slowly, despite the welcoming gentleness of the gravity. Energy was something to be conserved. There was an atmosphere of a prison here. These had once been people of openness, of the endless desert, she reminded herself. Now they were confined here, inside this icy warren. She thought that must be hurting them, perhaps on a level they didn’t appreciate themselves.

There were few children.

The people of Kasyapa were welcoming, but she found they were locked into tight family groups. She would always be an outsider here.

Madeleine spent a lot of time alone, cooped up in her ice-walled box. She engaged in peculiar time-delayed conversations with Nemoto; with a minimum of ten hours between comment and reply, it was more like receiving mail. Still, they spoke. And gradually Nemoto revealed the deeper purpose she had concocted for Madeleine.

“These people are starving,” Nemoto whispered. “And yet they are sitting on a frozen ocean…”

Triton was, Nemoto told her, probably the Solar System’s most remote significant and accessible cache of water, within the Kuiper Belt anyhow. She said that Robert Goddard, the American rocketry pioneer, had proposed — in a paper called “The Last Migration” — that Triton could be used as an outfitting and launching post for interstellar expeditions. “That was in 1927,” Nemoto said.

“Goddard was a farsighted guy,” Madeleine murmured.

“…Even if he got it wrong,” Nemoto was saying — had said, ten hours earlier. “Even if, as it turns out, Triton will be used as a staging post for expeditions from the stars. And not used by us, but by ETs. The Gaijin.”

But the ocean under Madeleine’s feet, tens of kilometers thick, was useless for the colonists as long as it was frozen hard as rock.

“Imagine if we could melt that ocean,” Nemoto said, her face an expressionless mask.

But how? The Sun was too remote. Of course the sunlight could be collected, by mirrors or lenses. But how big would such a mirror have to be? Thousands of kilometers wide, more? Such a project seemed absurd.

“It’s not the way humans work,” Madeleine said gloomily. “Look at the colonists here, burrowing like ants. We’re small and weak. We have to take the worlds as they are given to us, not rebuild them.”

Nemoto’s reply came many hours later. “And yet, that is exactly what we must do if we are to prevail. We are going to have to act more like Gaijin than humans.”

Nemoto had a plan. It involved diverting a moon called Nereid, slamming it into Triton.

Madeleine was immediately outraged. This was arrogance indeed.

But she let Nemoto’s data finish downloading.

It was a remarkable, bold scheme. The rocket engines that had brought the colonists here would now be used to divert a moon. The numbers added up. It could be done, Madeleine realized reluctantly. It would take a year, no more.

It was also, Madeleine thought, quite insane. She pictured Nemoto, stranded centuries out of her time, isolated, skulking in corners of the Moon, concocting mad schemes to hurl outer-planet moons back and forth, an old woman fighting the alien invasion, single-handed.

And yet, and yet…

She looked inward. What is it I want?

All her family, the people she had grown up with, were lost in the past, on a frozen world. She was rootless. And yet she had no pull to join this tight community, had felt no envy of Ben when Lena had recaptured him, on his arrival here. Her life had become a series of episodes, as she’d drifted through scenes of a more-or-less incomprehensible history. Was it even possible to sustain a consistent motivation — to find something to want?

Yes, she realized. It isn’t necessary to be picaresque. Look at Nemoto. She still knows what she wants, the same as she always did, after all these years. Maybe the same applied to Reid Malenfant, wherever he was. And maybe that was why Madeleine was attracted to Nemoto’s projects — not for the worth of the work, but for Nemoto’s singular strength of mind.

She went to discuss it with Ben. His first reaction was like hers.

“What you’re proposing is barbaric,” Ben said. “You talk of smashing one moon into another. You will destroy both.”

“It’s technically feasible. Nemoto’s numbers prove that a deflection of Nereid by the thruster systems from the orbiting transports would—”

“I’m not talking about feasibility. Many things are feasible. That doesn’t make them right. Once Triton is changed, it is changed forever. Who knows what future, wiser generations might have made of these resources we expend so carelessly?”

“But the Gaijin are on their way now.”

“We wreck this world, or they do. Is that the choice you offer?”

“Triton is ours to wreck, not theirs!”

He considered. “I will concede your plan has one positive outcome,” he said at length.

“What?”

“We are barely surviving here. The Yolgnu. That much is obvious. Perhaps with what you intend—”

She nodded. “It will work, Ben.”

“There will be a lot of opposition. People have been living here for generations. This is their home. As it is.”

“I know. It’s going to be hard for all of us.”

“What will you do now?”

She considered. She hadn’t thought it through that far. “We can send probes to Nereid,” she said. “Survey the emplacements of the thrust units, perhaps even initiate the work. Ben, those Gaijin are on their way, whatever we do. If we leave this too long we might not be able to do anything anyhow.” She squinted up at the ice roof, imagining the abandoned ships circling overhead. “We could even begin the deflection, start the thrusters. It will take a year of steady burning to set up the collision. But I’ll initiate nothing irrevocable until you get agreement from your people.”

“You started out your career as a transporter of weapons,” he said sadly. “And you are still transporting weapons.”

That irritated her. “Look, Triton is a lifeless planet. There is nothing here but humans, and what we brought.”

He eyed her. “Are you sure?”

After a couple of months, to Madeleine’s surprise, Lena Roach invited her to “go walkabout,” as she called it, to go see something more of Triton.

Madeleine was a little suspicious. She remained the focus of the colony’s intense debate about its future; few people were so open with her that such offers didn’t come with strings.

She spoke to Ben.

He laughed. “Well, you’re right. Everybody’s got a point of view. Lena has her opinion. But what harm can it do to go out and see some ice?”

Madeleine thought it over for a day.

The Nereid project had begun. Ben had loaned her Kasyapa engineers to detach the engine units from the transport hulks in orbit around Triton, reconfigure them for operation on Nereid, improvise systems to extract fuel from the substance of the moon. She had a small monitoring station set up in her ice cell that showed her, by telemetry and a visual feed, that sparse array of engines burning, twenty-four hours a day, consuming Nereid’s own material as fuel and reaction propellant, slowly, slowly pushing the battered moon out of its looping ellipse. It was good to have a project, to be able to immerse herself in engineering detail.

But she would have a year to wait, even if Kasyapa’s great debate concluded in an acceptance of her program. Ben, torn between his lost family and the endless work of the colony, had little time to spend with her. There were few people here, nowhere to escape, little to do. She still spent much of her time alone, in her ice cell, immersed in virtuals, reading up on the dismal history she had skipped over.

Getting out of here would be a good thing. She agreed to go along with Lena.

So they climbed aboard a surface tractor, a big balloon-tire bubble.

At first they drove in silence, the tractor bouncing gently. Madeleine felt as if she were floating, all but naked, above Triton’s icy ground. The sky was a velvet dome crowded with stars, and with that subtle, misty hull of Neptune riding at the zenith above their heads.

Lena was a small, compact woman, her movements patient and precise. She had been just twenty when Ben had departed for the Saddle Point. Her age was over a hundred and twenty years old, but, thanks to rejuvenation treatments, she might have been forty. But she didn’t act forty, Madeleine thought; she acted old.

The ground was complex. The tractor’s lights showed how the ice was stained pink, as if by traces of blood, and there were streaks of darker material laid over the surface. But here and there the dirty water-ice rock was overlaid by splashes of white, brilliant in the lights; this was nitrogen snow, fresh-fallen.

The land became more uneven. The tractor climbed a shallow ridge, and Madeleine found herself tipped precariously back in her seat. From the summit of the ridge she caught a glimpse of a landscape pocked by huge craters, each some thirty kilometers wide or more. But they weren’t like impact craters; many of them were oval in shape.

The tractor plunged into the nearest crater. The ground broke up into pits and flows, like frozen mud, and the tractor bounced and floated in great leaps.

“This is the oldest surface on Triton,” Lena said. “It covers perhaps a third of the surface. From orbit, the land looks like the surface of a cantaloupe melon, and that gave it its name. But this is difficult and dangerous terrain.” Her accent was odd, shaped by time, sounding strangulated to Madeleine. “These ‘craters’ are actually collapsed bubbles in the ice. They formed when the world froze… You know that Triton was once liquid?”

“After its capture.”

“Yes.”

“Neptune raised great tides in Triton. There was an ocean hundreds of kilometers deep — crusted over by a thin ice layer at its contact with the vacuum — that stayed liquid and warm, for half a billion years, as the orbit became a circle.”

Madeleine eyed her suspiciously. “Life. That’s what you’re getting at. Native life, here in the tidal melt of Triton.” Just as Ben had hinted. She wasn’t surprised, or much interested. Life emerged wherever it could; everybody knew that. Life was a commonplace.

“You know,” Lena said, “when we first came here we spread out from Kasyapa, around this little world.”

“You sang Triton.”

“Yes.” Lena smiled. “We made our roads with orbiting lasers, and we named the cantaloupe hollows and the snow fields and the craters. We were exhilarated, on this empty world. We were the Ancestors! But we grew… discouraged. Nothing moves here, save bits of ice and snow and gas. Nothing lives, save us. There aren’t even bones in the ground. Soon we found we had to ration food, energy, air. We mapped from orbit, sent out robots.”

“Robots don’t sing.”

“No. But there is nothing to sing here…”

Madeleine, with a sudden impulse, covered Lena’s hand with her own. “Perhaps one day. And perhaps there was life in the deep past.”

“You don’t yet understand,” Lena said, frowning. She tapped a control pad and the motor gunned.

The tractor followed complex ridge pathways, heading steadily away from Kasyapa.

They talked desultorily, about planetary formation, Lena’s long life on Triton, Madeleine’s strange experiences among the stars. They were exploring each other, Madeleine thought; and perhaps that was the purpose of this jaunt.

Lena knew, of course, about Ben’s relationship with Madeleine. At length they talked about that, tentatively.

Lena had known about it long before Ben had left for the stars. She knew such things were inevitable, even necessary, in a separation that crossed generations. She herself had taken lovers, even an informal second husband with whom she’d raised children. The ties of galay and dhuwa were, she said, too strong to be broken by mere time and space.

Madeleine found she liked Lena. She still wasn’t sure if she envied Lena the ties she shared with Ben. To be bound by such powerful bonds, for a lifetime of indefinite duration, seemed claustrophobic to her. Perhaps I’ve been isolated too long, she thought.

After some hours they reached a polar cap. It turned out to be a region of cantaloupe terrain where every depression was filled with nitrogen snow. They camped here, near the pole, on the fringe of interstellar space. Overhead, Madeleine saw cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice crystals.

The pole was a dangerous place to walk. She saw evidence of geysers — huge pits blasted clean of snow — and dark streaks across the land, tens of kilometers long, like the remnants of gigantic roads. All of this under Neptune’s smoky light, and a rich dazzle of stars.

This was an enchanting world. Madeleine found herself, reluctantly, falling in love with Triton.

Reluctantly, because, she was coming to realize, she would have to destroy this place.

Lena brought her, on foot, to a small unmanned science station, painted bright yellow so it stood out from the pinkish snow.

“We are running a seismic survey,” she said. “There are stations like this all over Triton. Every time we shake the surface, by so much as a footstep, waves travel through this world’s frozen interior, and we can deduce what lies there.”

“And?”

“You understand that Triton is a ball of rock, overlaid by an ocean — a frozen ocean. But ice is not simple.” Lena picked up a loose fragment of ice and cupped it in her gloved hands. “This form is called ice one. It is the familiar form of ice, just as on Earth’s surface.” She squeezed tighter. “But if I were to crush it, eventually the crystal structure would collapse to an alternative, more closely packed, arrangement of molecules.”

“Ice two.”

“Yes. But that is not the end. There is a whole series of stable forms, reached with increasing pressure, the crystal structure more and more distorted from the pure tetrahedral form of ice one. And so, inside Triton, there are a series of layers: ice one at the surface, where we walk, all the way to a shell of ice eight, which overlays the rocky core…”

Madeleine nodded, not very interested.

The snows seemed to be layered. The deeper she dug with her booted toe, the richer the purple-brown colors of the sediment strata she uncovered. This hemisphere was entering its forty-year spring, and the polar cap was evaporating; thin winds of nitrogen would eventually carry all this cap material to the other pole, where it would snow out. And later, when it was autumn here, the flow was reversed. Triton’s atmosphere was not permanent: It was only the polar caps in transit, from one axis to another.

But Lena was still talking. “…large scale rebuilding of the planet is the same as—”

Madeleine held up her hands. “You left me behind. What are you telling me, Lena?”

“That there is evidence of tampering, planetary tampering, from the deepest past, here on Triton.”

Madeleine felt chilled. “Even here?”

“Just like Venus. Just like Earth. Nothing is primordial. Everything has been shaped.”

That inner layer of ice eight was no crude seam of compressed mush. It was very pure. And it seemed to have been sculpted.

When they got back to the tractor Lena showed Madeleine diagrams, seismic maps. The core had facets — triangles, hexagons — each kilometers wide. “It’s as if somebody encased the core in a huge jewel,” she said. “And it must have been done before the general freezing.”

“Somebody came here,” Madeleine said slowly, “and — somehow, manipulating temperature and pressure in that deep ocean — froze out this cage around the seabed.”

“Yes.”

“And the life-forms there—”

“Immediately destroyed, of course, their nutrient supply blocked, their very cells broken open by the freezing. We can see them, their relics, in the deep samples we have taken.”

Madeleine felt a deep, unreasoning anger well up in her. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”

Lena shrugged. “Perhaps it was not malice. They may have had a mission — insane, but a mission. Perhaps they thought they were helping these primitive Triton bugs. Perhaps they wished to spare the bugs the pain of growth, change, evolution, death. This great crystal structure encodes very little information. You need only a few bits to characterize its composition — pure ice eight — and its regular, repeating structure. It is static, perfect — even incorruptible. Life, on the other hand, requires a deep complexity. It is this complexity that gives us our potential, and our pain. Perhaps, you see, they felt pity…”

Madeleine frowned. “Lena, did Ben encourage you to show me this? Are you trying to persuade me to back off the Nereid project?”

“Ben and I have different experiences,” Lena said. “He traveled to the stars, and saw many things. I worked here, helping to uncover this strange, ancient tragedy.”

Yes. There was no need to go to the stars, Madeleine saw now. It was here, all the time, on Venus and Triton and God-knows-where, and even Earth. The central paradoxical mystery of the universe. Everywhere, life emergent. Everywhere, life crushed. And no explanation why it had to be this way. Over and over.

She felt her anger burn brighter. She had made her own decision. This wasn’t simply what Nemoto wanted. It had become what she wanted. And that burning desire felt good.

Lena smiled, gnomic, wise.

By the time they got back to Kasyapa, the flower-ships had grown in Triton’s sky, until at last their delicate filigree structure was visible, just, with the naked eye. The same fucking Gaijin who had watched as Earth had gone to hell.

She sailed up to orbit, boarded Gurrutu, and headed for Nereid.

Madeleine first sighted Nereid ten days out. It grew rapidly, day by day, finally hour by hour, until its battered gray hide filled the viewing windows.

Rendezvous with the hurtling rock was difficult. The Gurrutu couldn’t muster the velocity change required to match Nereid’s crashing orbit. So Madeleine had to burn her engines and use tethers, harpooning this great rock whale as it hurtled past, letting her ship be dragged along with it. Gurrutu suffered considerable damage, but nothing significant enough to make Madeleine abort.

She entered a loose, slow orbit, inspecting the moon’s surface. Nereid was uninteresting: just a misshapen ball of dirty ice, pocked by craters; it was so small it had never melted, never differentiated into layers of rock and ice like Triton, never had any genuine geology. Nereid was a relic of the past, a ruin of the more orderly moon system that had been wrecked when Triton was captured.

But, despite its small size, it massed as much as 5 percent of Triton’s own bulk. And where Triton’s orbit, though retrograde, was neatly circular, Nereid followed a wide, swooping ellipse, taking almost an Earth year to complete a single one of its “months” around Neptune.

Nereid could be driven head-on into Triton. It would be a useful bullet.

She navigated with automatic star trackers, with radio Doppler fixes on Kasyapa, and by eye, using a sextant. Her purpose was to check the trajectory of the little moon, backing up the automated systems with this on-the-spot eyeballing, which, even now, was one of the most precise navigation systems known.

Nereid was right on the button. But this game of interplanetary pool was played on a gigantic table, and Triton was a small target. Even now, even so close, Nereid could be deflected from its impact.

At times the cold magnitude of the project — sending one world to impact another — awed her. This is too big for us. This is a project for the arrogant ones: the Gaijin, the others who strangled Venus and Triton.

But when she was close enough, she could see the glow of engines on Nereid’s far side: engines built by humans, placed by humans. Placed by her. She clung to her anger, seeking confidence.

Even now Ben debated the ethics of the situation with his people. Most people here had been born long after the emigration: born in the caverns of Kasyapa, now with children of their own. To them, Madeleine and Ben Roach were intruders from the muddy pool at the heart of the Solar System, invaders from another time who proposed to smash their world. The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.

She dozed in her sleeping compartment, a box little larger than she was. Inside, however, tucked into her sleeping bag with the folding door drawn to, she felt comfortable and secure. She would track Nereid as long as she could, guiding it to its destination, unless she was ordered to stand down.

She got a number of direct calls from Nemoto that she did not accept. Nemoto was irrelevant now.

At the very last minute Ben came through.

Somewhat to her surprise, the colonists had agreed to let the project go ahead. Ben would arrange for the temporary evacuation of the colonists from Kasyapa, to the hulks of the old transport ships still in orbit, now drifting without their engines.

“Lena is pleased,” he told her.

“Pleased?”

“By your reaction to the crystal shell around the core. The ice eight. She wanted to make you angry. If the project succeeds then the crystal shell will be destroyed. And the last trace of the native life will surely be destroyed with it.”

Madeleine growled. “I know, Ben. I always knew. The Triton bugs lost their war a long time ago, before they even had a chance to voice an opinion. Their memory should motivate us, not stop us. The crystal builders have gone, but the Gaijin are on their way, here, now. Well, the hell with them. This is the trench we’ve dug, and we aren’t going to quit it.”

“If,” he said, “the Gaijin are the true enemy.”

“They will do for now.”

He smiled sadly. “You sound like Nemoto.”

“None of us age gracefully. Why didn’t you tell me about the native life, Ben?”

His virtual image shrugged. “Not everybody who’s grown up here knows about it. Life is hard enough here without people learning that there is an alien artifact of unknown antiquity buried at the heart of the world.”

She nodded. And yet he hadn’t answered her question. Despite all we’ve been through — even though we’re both refugees from another age, and we traveled to the stars together — I’m not close enough for you to share your secrets.

At that moment, she felt the ties between them stretch, break. Now, she thought, I am truly alone; I have lost my only companion from the past. It was surprising how little it hurt.

“Here is another possibility,” Ben said. “Beyond ethics, beyond this perceived conflict with the Gaijin. You like to meddle, to smash things, Madeleine. You are like Nereid yourself, a rogue body, come to smash our little community. Perhaps this is why the plan is so appealing to you.”

“Perhaps it is,” she said, irritated. “You’ll have to judge my psychology for yourself.”

And with an angry stab, she shut down the comms link.

Alone in Gurrutu, she assembled a complete virtual projection of Triton, a three-dimensional globe a meter across. She looked for the last time at the ice surface of Triton, the subtle shadings of pink and white and brown.

She switched to a viewpoint at Triton’s evacuated equator. It was as if she were standing on Triton’s surface.

Nereid was supposed to do two things: to spin up Triton, and to melt its ancient oceans. Therefore she had steered the moon to come in at a steep angle, to deliver a sideways slap along Triton’s equator. And so, when she turned her virtual head, Nereid was looming low on the horizon: a lumpy, battered moon, visibly three-dimensional, rotating, growing minute by minute.

An icon in the corner of her view recorded a steady countdown. She deleted it. She’d always hated countdowns.

Her imaging systems picked out Gaijin flower-ships in low orbit around the moon, golden sparks arcing this way and that. She smiled. So the Gaijin were curious too. Let them watch. It would be, after all, the greatest impact in the Solar System since the end of the primordial bombardment.

Quite a show. And for once it would be humans lighting up the sky.

The end, when it came, seemed brutally fast. Nereid grew from a spot of darkness, to a pebble, to a patch of rock the size of her hand, to, Jesus, a roof of rock over the world, and then—

Blinding light. She gasped.

The image snapped back to an overview of the moon. She felt as if she had died and come back to life.

A plume of fragments was rising vertically from Triton’s surface, like one last mighty geyser: bits of red-hot rock, steam, glittering ice, some larger fragments that soared like cannonballs.

Nereid was gone.

Much of the little moon’s substance must already have been lost, rock and ice and rich organic volatiles blasted to vapor in that first second of impact: lost forever, lost to space. Perhaps it would form a new, temporary ring around Neptune; perhaps eventually, centuries from now, some of it would rain back on Triton, or some other moon.

This was an astoundingly inefficient process, she knew, and that had been a key objection of some of the Kasyapa factions. To burn up a moon, a whole four-billion-year-old moon, for such a poor gain is a crime. Madeleine couldn’t argue with that.

Except to say that this was war.

And now something emerged from the base of the plume. It was a circular shock wave, a wall of shattering ice like the rim of a crater, plowing its way across the ground. The terrain it left behind was shattered, chaotic, and she could see the glint of liquid water there, steaming furiously in the vacuum and cold. Ice formed quickly, in sheets and floes, struggling to plate over the exposed water. But echoes of that great shock still tore at this transient sea, and immense plates, diamond white, arced far above the water before falling back in a flurry of fragments.

Now, in that smashed region — from cryovolcanoes kilometers wide — volatiles began to boil out of Triton’s interior: nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, water vapor. Nereid’s heat was doing its work; what was left of the sister moon must be settling toward Triton’s core, burning, melting, flashing to vapor. Soon a mushroom of thickening cloud began to obscure the broken, churning surface. Some of the larger fragments thrown up by that initial plume began to hurtle back from their high orbits and burn streaks through Triton’s temporary atmosphere. And when they hit the churning water-ice beneath, they created new secondary plumes, new founts of destruction.

The shock wall, kilometers high, plowed on, overwhelming the ancient lands of ice, places where nitrogen frost still lingered. It was not going to stop, she realized now. The shock would scorch its way around the world. It would destroy all Triton’s subtlety, churning up the nitrogen snows of the north, the ancient organic deposits of the south, disrupting the slow nitrogen weather, destroying forever the ancient, poorly understood cantaloupe terrain. The shock wall would be a great eraser, she thought, eliminating all of Triton’s unsolved puzzles, four billion years of icy geology, in a few hours.

But those billowing ice-volcano clouds were already spreading in a great loose veil around the moon, the vapor reaching altitudes where it could outrun the march of the shattered ice. Mercifully, after an hour, Triton was covered, the death of its surface hidden under a layer of roiling clouds within which lightning flashed, almost continually.

She heard from Ben that the Yolgnu were celebrating. This was Triton Dreamtime, the true Dreamtime, when giants were shaping the world.

After three hours there was a new explosion, a new gout of fire and ice from the far side of the moon. That great shock wave had swept right around the curve of the moon until it had converged in a fresh clap of shattered ice at the antipode of the impact. Madeleine supposed there would be secondary waves, great circular ripples washing back and forth around Triton like waves in a bathtub, as the new ocean, seething, sought equilibrium.

Nemoto materialized before her.

“You improvised well, Madeleine.”

“Don’t patronize me, Nemoto. I was a good little soldier.”

But Nemoto, of course, five hours away, couldn’t hear her. “…Triton is useless now to the Gaijin, who need solid ice and rock for their building programs. But it is far from useless to humans. This will still be a cold world; a thick crust of ice will form. But that ocean could, thanks to the residual heat of Nereid and Neptune’s generous tides, remain liquid for a long time — for millions of 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. Find Malenfant. He is dying…