Space (65 page)

It made her obscurely proud.
This
is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome.
This:
even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.

She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feeta good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn't always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.

Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good 60 percent of the planet's population agreed to concur with Nemoto's advice.

Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room and slept twelve hours.

The final evacuation was swift.

The remnants of humanity had fled inward, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop suborbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving Sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.

And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These ETs clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.

Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.

Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.

They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl's body several times at least. On the way, she'd decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both -- she suspected -- secretly relieved.

Madeleine spent her last day on Mercury inside the Paulis mine in Caloris. This was a tube half a kilometer wide, the walls clear, the rocks beyond glowing orange-hot. It was the big brother of Frank Paulis's first ancient well on the Moon. This mine had never been completed, and perhaps never would be; but now it served a new purpose as a deep shelter for the remnants of humanity.

Giant temporary floors of spider silk and aluminum had been spun out over the shaft, cut through by supply ducts and cabling and a giant firefighter's pole of open elevators. Here -- safe from radiation and the Sun's heat and the shadow's cold -- half of Mercury's population, a million strong, was being housed in flimsy bubbles of spider silk and aluminum. The Paulis tunnel wasn't pressurized, of course, and so big flexible walkways ran between the bubbles. The floors were misty and translucent, as were the hab bubbles; and, looking down into the glowing pit of humanity, Madeleine could see people scattered over floor after floor, moving around their habs like microbes in droplets of water, receding into a misty, light-filled infinity.

It was well known she was planning to leave today. In the upper levels many faces were turned up to her -- she could see them, just pale dots. She had always been isolated, especially in this latest of her parachute drops back into human history. Perhaps she was getting too old, too detached from the times. In fact she suspected the displaced Triton colonists rather resented her -- as if she, who had guided them here, had somehow been responsible for the disaster that had befallen their home.

Anyhow, it was done. She turned her back on the glimmering interior of the Paulis mine, its cache of humans, and returned to the surface.

She flew up from Mercury, up through a cloud of Cracker ships.

Great sails were all around her. Even partly furled, theywere huge, spanning tens of kilometers, like pieces of filmy landscapes torn loose and thrown into the sky. Some of themhad been made transparent rather than furled, so that the bright light of the Sun shone through skeletal structures of shining threads. And the wings had a complex morphology, each warping and twisting and curling, presumably in response to the density of the light falling on it, and the thin shadows cast by its neighbors.

The Cracker ships sailed close to each other: in great layers, one over the other, sometimes barely half a kilometer apart, a tiny separation compared to the huge expanse of the wings. Sometimes they were so close that a curl in one wing would cause a rippling response in others, great stacks of the wings turning like the pages of an immense book. But Madeleine never once saw those great wings touch; the coordination was stunning.

Madeleine rose up through all this, just bulling her way through in her squat little Gaijin lander. The wonderful wings just curled out of her way.

At ten Mercury diameters, she looked back.

Mercury was a ball of rock, maybe the size of her palmheld at arm's length. It looked as if it were wrapped in silverypaper, shifting layers of it, as if it were some huge Christmaspresent -- or perhaps as if immense silvery wasps were crawling all over it. Quite remarkably beautiful, she thought. But, shereflected bitterly, if there was one thing she had learned in her long and dubious career, it was that beauty clung as closely to objects of killing and pain and horror as to the good; and so itwas here.

She stretched, weightless. She felt deeply -- if shamefully -- relieved to be alone once more, in control of her own destiny, without the complication of other people around her.

Nemoto called her from the surface.

"I'm surprised they let you through like that. The Crackers. You're in a Gaijin ship, after all."

"But the Gaijin are gone. The Crackers clearly don't believe the Gaijin are a threat anymore. And they don't even seem to have noticed us humans." The Crackers are just kicking over the anthill, she thought, without even looking to see what was there, what
we
were.

"Meacher, how far out are you?"

"Ten diameters."

"That should be sufficient," Nemoto hissed.

"Sufficient for what?... Never mind. Nemoto, how can you choose death? You've lived so long, seen so much."

"I've seen enough."

"And now you want to rest?"

"No. What rest is there in death? I only want to act."

"To save the species one more time?"

"Perhaps. But the battle is never over, Meacher. The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and manipulation and destruction we will find... Consider Mercury, for example, which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the Sun-breaking Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it was a little
odd
that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so
conveniently
right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some predecessors of the Crackers -- even their ancestors -- have
arranged
the giant impact that stripped off Mercury's crust and mantle, left behind this rust ball?"

Madeleine was stunned by this deepening of the great violation of the Solar System. But, deliberately, she shook her head. "Even if that's true, what difference does it make?"

Nemoto barked laughter. "None at all. You're right. One thing at a time. You always were practical, Meacher. And what next for you? Will you stay with the others, huddled in the caves of Mercury?"

Madeleine frowned. "I'm not a good huddler, Nemoto. And besides, these are not my people."

"The likes of us have no 'people'--"

"Malenfant," Madeleine said. "Wherever he is, whatever he faces, he is alone. I'm going to try to find him."

"Ah," Nemoto whispered. "Malenfant, yes. He may be the most important of us all. Good-bye, Meacher."

"Nemoto?--"

Mercury exploded.

She had to go over it again, rerun the recordings, over and over, before she understood.

It had happened in an instant. It was as if the top couple of meters of Mercury's surface had just lifted off and hailed into the sky.

All over Mercury -- from the depths of Caloris Planitia to the crumpled lands at the antipode, from Chao City at the south pole to the abandoned settlements of the north -- miniature cannon snouts had poked their way out of the regolith and fired into the sky. The bullets weren't smart: just bits of rock and dust dug out of the deeper regolith. But they were moving fast, far faster than Mercury's escape velocity.

The Crackers didn't stand a chance. Mercury rocks tore through filmy wings, overwhelming self-repair facilities. The Cracker ships, like butterflies in a reverse hailstorm, were shredded. Ships collided, or plunged to Mercury's surface, or drifted into space, powerless, beyond the reach of help.

The Moon flowers, of course, were the key -- or rather their dumb, gen-enged descendants were, transplanted to Mercury by Nemoto, a wizened, interplanetary Johnny Appleseed. The Moon flowers could make a serviceable chemical-rocket propellant for their seed pores from aluminum and oxygen extracted from Moon rock -- or Mercury rock. Nemoto had engineered the flowers' descendants to make weapons.

The Crackers had nobody even to fire back at, no way to avoid the rising storm of rock and dust. Even one survivor might have been sufficient to resume the Crackers' mission, for all anybody knew. But there were no survivors. The Crackers had taken a thousand years to reach Mercury, to fly from Procyon and battle through a shell of Gaijin ships. It had taken humans -- rock-world vermin, contemptuously ignored -- a thousand seconds to destroy them.

As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships -- overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space -- Madeleine whooped and howled.

The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the Sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square meter of the surface had been raked over.

She contacted the Coalition.

Every human on Mercury had survived -- even those who hadn't taken Nemoto's advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.

Every human but Nemoto, of course.

At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of ET assholes come chomping their way through the Solar System. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.

As for me -- story's over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.

And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury -- still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft. Fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.

Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star's surface. Farther out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris that seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond
that
there were only the Galaxy core stars -- watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.

This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.

Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signal: a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.

In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire Solar System -- and the same thing had occurred many times before.

We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.

It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin stargazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from little green men.

In fact it was a killer of little green men.

She woke to the movement of air: the rustle of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.

She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.

And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.

She remembered.

Io.
She had been on Io.

Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant's grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.

The Gaijin hadn't seemed to understand.

Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain--

And now,
this.
Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.