by Paul McAuley
Newt’s detractors said that he’d spent his life trying to escape from the gravity well of his mother’s fame - that he was driven to prove that he could equal or better her achievements. He’d been something of a daredevil trader before the war, constantly getting into scrapes and dubious capers, and although he’d proved his worth during the Quiet War and had been a cheerful and energetic leader of the crew that had designed and built the ramscoops that sifted from Uranus’s atmosphere the deuterium and tritium needed to fuel the Free Outers’ ships, many people suspected that his support for exploration of Neptune and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt was motivated not by considerations about their safety and best possible future but by his notorious addiction to self-promotion and adventure.
Many of the Free Outers didn’t trust his partner, Macy Minnot, either. After all, she was from Earth, and had defected in dubious circumstances: murder, sabotage, the abrupt end of a cooperative project involving Greater Brazil and the city of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. There had been rumours before the war that she was some kind of double agent, that her prominent support for the peace movement had helped to undermine any possibility that the Jupiter and Saturn systems might mount a credible defence against invasion by Earth’s three great powers. The taint of these rumours still clung to her, even though she’d been instrumental in saving Avernus and stealing the fusion-motor schematics, and had shared every hardship and had worked as hard as anyone to make the tunnel habitats safe and pleasant places to live.
Macy knew that the people who objected to mounting an exploratory expedition also harboured deep and unshakeable suspicions about her, and she tried her best not to care. She herself was in two minds about the plans that Newt championed. She supported him, and she would go with him if he carried the day, no question, but it meant venturing even further away from Earth and the hearthlight of the sun, and she had already travelled further than most Outers. From Earth to Jupiter, where she had been forced to defect. Then from Jupiter to Saturn when it became clear that if she tried to return to Earth she would be arrested for treason. And then from Saturn to Uranus. But she was certain that the TPA would come after the Free Outers sooner rather than later, and that the Free Outers wouldn’t be able to mount a credible defence against a highly trained force with every kind of experience of warfare and overwhelmingly superior resources. That had been amply proven during the Quiet War, when a small expeditionary force from Earth had out-thought and out-fought the Outers on their own territory. The Free Outers who believed it might be possible to engage in a guerilla war or spin some kind of startlingly powerful weapon system out of the vast repository of the Library of the Commons and take the fight to the enemy were peddling comforting fairy tales that had about as much substance as a comet’s tail. At best, they might be able to mount some kind of Spartan last stand, but it would be a pointless sacrifice. No, from now on they’d have to live by the old maxim of every refugee: silence, exile, and cunning.
Macy was an exile twice over. First from Earth, and now from her adopted home on Dione. And although she had been living in the Outer System for two years before the Quiet War and had now spent more than a year in exile on Miranda, she was still not reconciled to spending the rest of her life under some kind of tent or dome, or inside a tunnel. And she was homesick, too. Sometimes she would pull up a telescopic view of the inner system transmitted from one or other of the observatories hidden at the south poles of Ariel, Umbriel, and Titania. Mercury was lost in the glare of the sun, but the other three rocky planets were clearly visible. Bright Venus, rust-red Mars, and the blue disc of Earth, hung in sable black with its pale bride. At maximum magnification, Macy could make out Earth’s land masses and oceans - even some of the larger weather systems, such as tropical storms swirling across the Pacific Ocean. She would think of rain lashing down on a rolling seascape that stretched from horizon to horizon, of thunder and wild wind, fingers of strong sunlight breaking through storm clouds . . . The images rising up strong and clear in her mind, a sweet sharp pang compounded of nostalgia and regret piercing her heart.
If Macy started to think about all the things that she missed she’d never stop. Snow creaking under her boots and a cutting wind pinching her face as she marched with other labourers in the R&R Corps to another day’s work dismantling the ruins of Chicago. The sun setting over Lake Superior, sinking beneath a ladder of thin clouds tinged pink in the darkening blue sky, everything reflected with perfect fidelity in the calm mirror of the water. Brassy city sunsets over the rooftops of Pittsburgh. The vast slow sunsets over the Nebraskan plain, and the starry empires mapped across Nebraska’s night sky. Sunlight hot against her face, red on her closed eyelids. Rain. Storm waves exploding into foam on a rocky shore. The chirr of grasshoppers in dry summer grass. Cathedral forests. An explosion of pale roses in a dark clearing. Crowds of strangers swirling down brawling streets.
She missed meat. The Outers were vegetarians out of habit born from necessity, and the approximations spun by the foodmakers were nothing like the real thing. Macy dreamed of keeping a few chickens amongst the truck gardens of the habitat. The Free Outers possessed the equipment and know-how to quicken plants and animals from genome maps, and there were thousands of maps of all kinds of species in the Library of the Commons. She probably wouldn’t be allowed to kill and cook a chicken - it would confirm every bad notion the Outers had about her - but at least she’d have a supply of eggs . . .
Currently, some four hundred days after the Free Outers had first settled on Miranda, Earth and Uranus were about as close to each other as they ever got - yet they were still separated by almost 4.4 billion kilometres, a gulf almost impossible to imagine. Macy had enough trouble visualising the distance between the missile silo and trailer park in Nebraska, where she’d grown up in the tender care of the Church of the Divine Regression, and Pittsburgh, where she’d lived after she’d escaped. A lousy two thousand kilometres. And the distance between Earth and Uranus was more than two million times greater. It had taken her three weeks, hitching rides and walking, to reach Pittsburgh; travelling at the same rate, it would take her 115,000 years to cross the gulf between Uranus and Earth. Even if she stole one of the ships, assuming she could learn how to fly one and it had enough fuel, it would take something like twenty-four weeks to make the trip. Yes, Earth was a very long way away. But most of the little worlds beyond the orbit of Uranus hung at even greater distances from each other in a vast cold dark through which the small lives of the Free Outers might fall for ever, dwindling to dust and less than dust. It seemed inconceivable that they could build any kind of life for themselves so far from the sun, yet that was what Newt and his little crew of maniacs were planning.
While the rest of the Free Outers had been turning the cut-and-cover tunnels into a comfortable home, Newt’s motor crew had been designing and building their first working prototype of the Brazilian fusion motor. Many of the Free Outers had worked in the transport trade before the Quiet War. They’d owned their own ships or had piloted ships on behalf of collectives. They were experts in ship construction and maintenance. But the motor crew were true technical wizards, young and eager and frighteningly intense, and used a battery of psychotropic drugs to sharpen their formidable intelligence, hone their powers of concentration, and work around the clock. They scoured the files of stolen technical data and borrowed most of the Free Outers’ memo space to construct a virtual model accurate down to the atomic level. They cannibalised two ships for components and rare metals and used printers to fabricate components and grow the ceramic reaction chamber molecule by molecule. The Brazilian motor required antiprotons to catalyse fast-fusion reactions. At first, the crew discussed mining antiprotons created by reactions between high-energy cosmic rays and Uranus’s outer atmosphere, but these were too few and too widely scattered. So instead they had the construction robots excavate a tube a kilometre long, and built inside it a linear particle accelerator that used a quantum diffraction version of a Cochcroft-Walt
on generator to fire raw quarks at hydrogen atoms suspended in a laser trap. This required the output of fusion generators dismounted from three ships, and some three hundred days’ hard work, but at the end of it they had enough fuel to conduct the first test firing.
The motor crew dug a pit in the icy plain a couple of hundred kilometres north of the Free Outer settlement, filled it with a web of fullerene scaffolding, inserted the prototype motor with its tail pointing upward, and connected it to fuel lines and a mass of monitoring equipment. Then they retreated over the horizon to the control-and-command bunker - they were fairly sure that if there was a containment breach it wouldn’t do much more than melt a hole in the adamantine ice, but they were taking no risks - and got ready for the critical moment.
The hot, cramped bunker stank of tension and four a.m. funk. Construction of the prototype had consumed much time and valuable and irreplaceable resources. Everyone knew that if the test failed the rest of the Free Outers would almost certainly vote against resumption of their work. The young men and women sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor, masked by spex, skating fingertips over slates or shaping the air with their hands like so many blind people investigating an elephant. Newt Jones and Macy Minnot were squashed together in one corner. Someone had rigged up a big red button that was linked to the AI that controlled the test rig. Now, with just a minute to go, Newt offered the plastic box that housed the button to Macy, asked her if she would like the honour.
‘It’s your thing. You should do it,’ Macy said.
‘It’s your thing too. And I’m so scared I’ll jinx it my hand’s cramped,’ Newt said.
‘You don’t want the responsibility if it goes wrong,’ Macy said, but took the box as one of the tech wizards began a countdown that everyone joined in, a jubilant chant reeling backwards from ten.
At zero, Macy pushed down the button with both thumbs and in the multiple views tiled in the memo space in the middle of the crowded little room a narrow searchlight shot up into the black sky, so brilliant its blaze of white light scoured all detail from the rugged plain. Everyone cheered and hugged each other and clapped each other on the back. Newt kissed Macy and she kissed him and the room began to shake and rattle as vibrations in the icy regolith raced past. Two seconds later, the AI began to throttle back the motor and the searchlight dimmed and went out. The vibrations died away. The bunker was quiet for a moment, and then everyone began to talk to everyone else, arguing over the telemetry, throwing out and refining thrust parameters and fuel consumption, exhaust velocity and burn efficiency . . .
There were more tests: days and days of tests. The crew ramped up antiproton production and began to build a second motor. The prototype was unbolted from the static-firing rig and fitted inside Newt and Macy’s tug, and Newt took the little ship out on a test flight that looped around Uranus’s outermost moon, Ferdinand. A round trip of more than forty million kilometres, there and back again in less than a day.
After this triumph, Newt and the rest of the motor crew put their plans for a real trip beyond the Uranus system to the general assembly where all matters large and small were decided by debate and free vote. Newt made a passionate speech, using all his considerable charm and fluency; the senior tech wizard, Ziff Larzer, explained that most of the crew would stay behind, manufacturing motors and fitting them into ships, while the expedition was away. But they had to field numerous objections, principally from a group led by Mary Jeanrenaud, who was not only the oldest member of the Free Outers, but had been one of the leaders of the peace and reconciliation movement before the war. She commanded a considerable amount of respect, and talked eloquently about the need to conserve resources, to build outwards, yes, but only from strong foundations.
‘We do not yet have those foundations in place. We are getting there, it’s true, but to achieve that goal all of us must work together. I can understand that some have grown impatient and find it difficult to keep a steady course. But we must not falter, difficult though it may seem. For otherwise we are in danger of dissipating our energies and our goals, of rushing off in too many different directions, after too many dreams. And that will leave us divided, and weak and vulnerable.’
Mary Jeanrenaud won considerable applause for this, and when it had died down Idriss Barr stood up and ankled to the bottom of the grass bowl. He wasn’t exactly the leader of the Free Outers’ democratic collective, but he was one of the people who listened to every side of every argument, arbitrated on minor disputes, and generally united the group. Tall and lithe and vigorous, he possessed an easy authority that he wore lightly and carelessly for the most part, but wouldn’t hesitate to use when he wanted to make a point or force a discussion in the direction he wanted it to go. He spoke now about their future. They would make a choice today and they must unite behind that choice and joyfully and gladly seize the opportunities it would give them.
‘We’ve done so much here in just a year. It’s amazing. And we will continue to amaze ourselves,’ he said. ‘We have shown that we can make our home anywhere we choose. We should not be afraid of fresh challenges, because we know that we have the resolve and skill to overcome them. Here at Uranus, and at Neptune, at Pluto, or anywhere else in the Solar System.’
Macy was astonished. Previously, Idriss Barr had supported the motor crew’s work on the strict condition that they had just one goal: to fit out every ship with the fast new fusion motor so that, when the time came, they could outrun any attempt at pursuit. Now he was calling for exploration and expansion.
‘He changed his mind and you knew it,’ she said to Newt, who was sitting next to her at the top of the grassy bowl. ‘That’s why you’ve been so calm. You had a secret weapon all along.’
‘Idriss is a good man who wants the best for everyone. He likes to lead from the rear, and he can be persuaded to change his mind if you show him what other people think,’ Newt said. ‘We canvassed people we reckoned were sympathetic to us, showed him the results. Mary and her friends have a lot of kudos, but kudos doesn’t mean too much out here. And most of us want to explore and spread out. We always have. It’s why we’re here.’
‘My partner the politician.’
‘It isn’t politics. It’s common sense. Not much different from figuring out how to pitch the price of a hold full of tea moss, it turns out.’
One by one people stood up and descended to the centre of the circle and picked up a small white plastic ball and dropped it in one of two glass cylinders, one tinted red for no, one tinted green for yes. The proposal to mount an exploratory expedition to Pluto and Neptune quickly gained a clear majority. By the time Macy’s turn came and she dropped her ball in the green-tinted cylinder, it was almost full.
Idriss Barr asked if he really needed to declare the count, winning laughter from the people circled around. So it was decided, and because Newt’s crew had already made detailed flight plans covering every aspect of the expedition, departure was scheduled for just twenty days later. Food and drink were brought out, several people started up a percussion group, and the meeting turned into a party that lasted late into the night.
They were on their way.
2
The spy spent more than four hundred days looking for Zi Lei on Iapetus. It should have been easy to find her. There were only ten thousand indigenous inhabitants, plus a few hundred people who’d fled from other moons or had been stranded there by the war. And he knew where she’d been born: the farm at Grandoyne Crater that her family still owned, the very first place he visited. Her family welcomed him warmly, for he was a friend who’d known her when she’d been living in Paris, Dione, someone who could tell them what she had been doing before the war and how she had escaped from prison when it had started. But they claimed that they did not know where she was now and said that they’d lost contact with her when she’d left Iapetus more than five tears ago.
‘She stopped taking her medication,’ Zi Lei’s mother said.
‘She believed that she was on
a mission,’ Zi Lei’s father said.
They were both olive-skinned and black-haired like their daughter, with the same tuck in the corners of their dark brown eyes. Zi Lei had left without warning, they said. It had taken them some time to discover that she’d hitched a ride on a tug that had returned to Xamba, Rhea, after trading with farms and oases in the region. Her mother had gone to Xamba to talk to her, but Zi had already moved on, to Paris, Dione, and had ignored all attempts to contact her ever since.
The spy told Zi’s parents that she had friends in Paris who had encouraged her to take the medicine that kept her calm and suppressed her fantasies, although she had not always listened to their advice.
‘Were you happy together?’ Zi’s mother said.
‘I tried my best to take care of her.’
‘But were you happy?’
‘As much as we could be,’ the spy said. ‘She taught me many things.’
Talking about his feelings for Zi Lei made him feel uncannily naked. Scared and exposed but also weirdly happy. As if the world and his purpose were completely aligned and in harmony: every atom, every quantum of energy singingly aware that he was in love with Zi Lei and he was on a mission to find her. He’d been on a mission when he had slipped into Paris before the war, of course, but this time he wasn’t driven by loyalty and duty but by love. A love he believed to be pure and selfless. All his life he had been trained to complete his mission or die trying. He would not stop searching for Zi until he found her or discovered what had happened to her.
