As they drove around the end of a ridge, past a tumble of ice boulders carved into human figures, some caught up in a whirling dance, others eagerly pushing their way out of granitic ice, Lexi explained that one Christmas after the end of the Quiet War, her last Christmas on Dione, Macy Minnot had come up with an idea for her own sculpture, and borrowed one of the big construction machines and filled its hopper with a mix of ice dust and a thixotropic, low-temperature plastic.
“It’s too cold for ice crystals to melt under pressure and bind together,” Lexi said. “The plastic was a binding agent, malleable at first, gradually hardening off. So you could pack the dust into any shape. You understand?”
“I’ve seen snow, once.”
It had been in the European Union, the Alps: a conference on security of shipping ports. Mai, freshly divorced, had taken her daughter, then a toddler. She remembered Shahirah’s delight in the snow. The whole world transformed into a soft white playground.
“There’s always a big party, the night before the beginning of the competition. Macy and her partner got wasted, and they started up their construction machine. Either they intended to surprise everyone, or they decided they couldn’t wait. Anyway, they forgot to include any stop or override command in the instruction set they’d written. So the machine just kept going,” Lexi said, and steered the rolligon through a slant of deep shadow and swung it broadside, drifting to a stop at the edge of a short steep drop.
They were at the far side of the little flock of ridges. The rumpled dented plain stretched away under the black sky, and little figures marched across it in a straight line.
Mai laughed. The shock of it. The madly wonderful absurdity.
“They used fullerene to make the arms and eyes and teeth,” Lexi said. “The scarves are fullerene mesh. The noses are carrots. The buttons are diamond chips.”
There were twenty, thirty, forty of them. Each two meters tall, composed of three spheres of descending size stacked one on top of the other. Pure white. Spaced at equal intervals. Black smiles and black stares, vivid orange noses. Scarves rippling in an impalpable breeze. Marching away like an exercise in perspective, dwindling over the horizon…
“Thierry loved this place,” Lexi said. “He often came out here to meditate.”
They sat and looked out at the line of snowmen for a long time. At last, Lexi started the rolligon and they drove around the end of the ridges and rejoined the road and drove on to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.
It was a simple dome that squatted inside the rimwall of a circular crater. A forest ran around its inner circumference; lawns and formal flowerbeds circled a central building patchworked from a dozen architectural styles, blended into each other like a coral reef. Mai’s reception reminded her of the first time she’d arrived at her daughter’s arcology: adults introducing themselves one by one, excited children bouncing around, bombarding her with questions. Was the sky really blue, on Earth? What held it up? Were there really wild animals that ate people?
There was a big, informal meal, a kind of picnic in a wide grassy glade in the forest, where most of the clan seemed to live. Walkways and ziplines and nets were strung between sweet chestnuts and oaks and beech trees; ring platforms were bolted around the trunks of the largest trees; pods hung from branches like the nests of weaver birds.
Mai’s hosts told her that most of the clan lived elsewhere, these days. Paris. A big vacuum-organism farm on Rhea. Mars. Titan. A group out at Neptune, living in a place Macy Minnot and her partner helped build after they fled the Saturn system at the beginning of the Quiet War. The habitat was becoming more and more like a museum, people said. A repository of souvenirs from the clan’s storied past.
Thierry’s workshop was already part of that history. Two brick kilns, a paved square under a slant of canvas to keep off the rain occasionally produced by the dome’s climate control machinery. A potter’s wheel with a saddle-shaped stool. A scarred table. Tools and brushes lying where he’d left them. Neatly labeled tubs of clay slip, clay balls, glazes. A clay-stained sink under a standpipe. Lexi told Mai that Thierry had mined the clay from an old impact site. Primordial stuff billions of years old, refined to remove tars and other organic material.
Finished pieces were displayed on a rack of shelves. Dishes in crescent shapes glazed with black and white arcs representing segments of Saturn’s rings. Bowls shaped like craters. Squarish plates stamped with the surface features of tracts of Dione and other moons. Craters, ridges, cliffs. Plates with spattered black shapes on a white ground, like the borderland between Iapetus’s dark and light halves. Vases shaped like shepherd moons. A scattering of irregular chunks in thick white glaze—pieces of the rings. A glazed tan ribbon with snowmen lined along it…
It was so very different from the tourist stuff Thierry had made, yet recognizably his. And highly collectible, according to Lexi. Unlike most artists in the outer system, Thierry hadn’t trawled for sponsorship and subscriptions, made pieces to order, or given access to every stage of his work. He had not believed in the democratization of the creative process. He had not been open to input. His work had been very private, very personal. He hadn’t liked to talk about it, Lexi said. He hadn’t let anyone get close to that part of him. This secrecy had eventually driven them apart, but it had also contributed to his reputation. People were intrigued by his work, by his response to the moonscapes of the Saturn system, his outsider’s perspective, because he refused to explain it. He’d earned large amounts of credit and kudos—tradable reputation—from sale of his ceramics, but had spent hardly any of it. The work was enough, as far as he’d been concerned. Mai, remembering the sand sculptures, thought she understood a little of this. She asked if he’d been happy, but no one seemed able to answer the question.
“He seemed to be happy, when he was working,” the habitat’s patriarch, Rory Jones, said.
“He didn’t talk much,” someone else said.
“He liked to be alone,” Lexi said. “I don’t mean he was selfish. Well, maybe he was. But he mostly lived inside his head.”
“He made this place his home,” Rory Jones said, “and we were happy to have him living here.”
The habitat’s chandelier lights had dimmed to a twilight glow. Most of the children had wandered off to bed; so had many of the adults. Those left sat around a campfire on a hearth of meteoritic stone, passing around a flask of honeysuckle wine, telling Mai stories about her father’s life on Dione.
He had walked around Dione, one year. A journey of some seven thousand kilometers. Carrying a bare minimum of consumables, walking from shelter to shelter, settlement to settlement. Staying in a settlement for a day or ten days or twenty before moving on. Walking the world was much more than exploring or understanding it, Mai’s hosts told her. It was a way of re-creating it. Of making it real. Of binding yourself to it. Not every outer walked around their world, but those who did were considered virtuous, and her father was one such.
“Most visitors only see the parts they know about,” a woman told Mai. “The famous views, the famous shrines and oases. A fair few come to climb the ice cliffs of Padua Chasmata. And they are spectacular climbs. Four or five kilometers. Huge views when you top out. But we prefer our own routes, on ridges or rimwalls you’d hardly notice, flying over them. There’s a very gnarly climb close by, in a small crater the military used as a trash dump in the Quiet War. The achievement isn’t the view, but testing yourself against your limits. Your father understood that. He was no ring runner.”
This led into another story. It seemed that there was a traditional race around the equator of another of Saturn’s moons, Mimas. It was held every four years: taking part in it was a great honor. Shortly after the end of the Quiet War, a famous athlete, Sony Shoemaker, had come to Mimas, determined to win it. She had trained on Earth’s Moon for a year, had bought a custom-made p-suit from one of the best suit tailors in Camelot. Like all the other competitors, she had qualified by completing a
course around the peak in the centre of the rimwall of Arthur crater within a hundred and twenty hours. Fifty days later she set out, ranked last in a field of thirty-eight.
Mimas was a small moon, about a third the size of Dione. A straight route around its equator would be roughly two and a half thousand kilometers long, but there was no straight route. Unlike Dione, Mimas had never been resurfaced by ancient floods of water-ice lava. Its surface was primordial, pockmarked, riven. Craters overlapping craters. Craters inside craters. Craters strung along rimwalls of larger craters. And the equatorial route crossed Herschel, the largest crater of all, a hundred and thirty kilometers across, a third of the diameter of Mimas, its steep rimwalls kilometers tall, its floor shattered by blocky, chaotic terrain.
The race was as much a test of skill in reading and understanding the landscape as of endurance. Competitors were allowed to choose their own route and set out caches of supplies, but could only use public shelters, and were disqualified if they called for help. Some died rather than fail. Sony Shoemaker did not fail, and astonished aficionados by coming fourth. She stayed on Mimas, afterwards. She trained. Four years later she won, beating the reigning champion, Diamond Jack Dupree.
He did not take his defeat lightly. He challenged Sony Shoemaker to another race. A unique race, never before attempted. A race around a segment of Saturn’s rings.
Although the main rings are seventy-three thousand kilometers across, a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon, they average just ten meters in thickness, but oscillations propagating across the dense lanes of the B ring pile up material at its outer edge, creating peaks a kilometer high. Diamond Jack Dupree challenged Sony Shoemaker to race across one of these evanescent mountains.
The race did not involve anything remotely resembling running, but it was muscle powered, using highly modified p-suits equipped with broad wings of alife material with contractile pseudo-musculatures and enough area to push, faintly, lightly, against ice pebbles embedded in a fragile lace of ice gravel and ice dust. Cloud swimming. A delicate rippling controlled by fingers and toes that would slowly build up momentum. The outcome determined not by speed or strength, because if you went too fast you’d either sheer away from the ephemeral surface or plough under it, but by skill and judgment and patience.
Sony Shoemaker did not have to accept Diamond Jack Dupree’s challenge. She had already proved herself. But the novelty of it, the audacity, intrigued her. And so, a year to the day after her victory on Mimas, after six months hard training in water tanks and on the surface of the dusty egg of Methone, one of Saturn’s smallest moons, Sony Shoemaker and Diamond Jack Dupree set off in their manta-ray p-suits, swimming across the peaks and troughs of a mountainous, icy cloud at the edge of the B ring.
It was the midsummer equinox. The orbits of Saturn and its rings and moons were aligned with the sun; the mountains cast ragged shadows across the surface of the B ring; the two competitors were tiny dark arrowheads rippling across a luminous slope. Moving very slowly, almost imperceptibly, to begin with. Gradually gaining momentum, skimming along at ten and then twenty kilometers an hour.
There was no clear surface. The ice-particle mountains emitted jets and curls of dust and vapor. There were currents and convection cells. It was like trying to swim across the flank of a sandstorm.
Sony Shoemaker was the first to sink. Some hundred and thirty kilometers out, she moved too fast, lost contact with a downslope, and plunged through ice at the bottom and was caught in a current that subducted her deep into the interior. She was forced to use the jets of her p-suit to escape, and was retrieved by her support ship. Diamond Jack Dupree wallowed on for a short distance, and then he too sank. And never reappeared.
His p-suit beacon cut off when he submerged, and although the support ships swept the mountain with radar and microwaves for several days, no trace of him was ever found. He had vanished, but there were rumors that he was not dead. That he had dived into a camouflaged lifepod he’d planted on the route, slept out the rescue attempts, and gone on the drift or joined a group of homesteaders, satisfied that he had regained his honor.
There had been other races held on the ring mountains, but no one had ever beaten Diamond Jack Dupree’s record of one hundred and forty-three kilometers. No one wanted to. Not even Sony Shoemaker.
“That’s when she crossed the line,” Rory Jones told Mai. “Winning the race around Mimas didn’t make her one of us. But respecting Diamond Jack Dupree’s move, that was it. Your father crossed that line, too. He knew.”
“Because he walked around the world,” Mai said. She was trying to understand. It was important to them, and it seemed important to them that she understood.
“Because he knew what it meant,” Rory said.
“One of us,” someone said, and all the outers laughed.
Tall skinny pale ghosts jackknifed on stools or sitting cross-legged on cushions. All elbows and knees. Their faces angular masks in the firelight flicker. Mai felt a moment of irreality. As if she was an intruder on someone else’s dream. She was still very far from accepting this strange world, these strange people. She was a tourist in their lives, in the place her father had made his home.
She said, “What does it mean, go on the drift? Is it like your wanderjahrs?”
She’d discovered that custom when she’d done some background research. After reaching majority, young outers often set out on extended and mostly unplanned tours of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Working odd jobs, experiencing all kinds of cultures and meeting all kinds of people before at last returning home and settling down.
“Not exactly,” Lexi said. “You can come home from a wanderjahr. But when you go on the drift, that’s where you live.”
“In your skin, with whatever you can carry and no more,” Rory said.
“In your p-suit,” someone said.
“That’s what I said,” Rory said.
“And homesteaders?” Mai said.
Lexi said, “That’s when you move up and out to somewhere no one else lives, and make a life there. The solar system out to Saturn is industrialized, more or less. More and more people want to move away from all that, get back to what we once were.”
“Out to Uranus,” someone said.
“Neptune,” someone else said.
“There are homesteaders all over the Centaurs now,” Rory said. “You know the Centaurs, Mai? Primordial planetoids that orbit between Saturn and Neptune. The source of many short-term comets.”
“Macy Minnot and her friends settled one, during the Quiet War,” Lexi said. “It was only a temporary home, for them, but for many it’s become permanent.”
“Even the scattered disc is getting crowded now, according to some people,” Rory said.
“Planetoids like the Centaurs,” Lexi told Mai, “with long, slow orbits that take them inward as far as Neptune, and out past Pluto, past the far edge of the Kuiper belt.”
“The first one, Fiddler’s Green, was settled by mistake,” Rory said.
“It’s a legend,” a young woman said.
“I once met someone who knew someone who saw it, once,” Rory said. “Passed within a couple of million kilometers and spotted a chlorophyll signature, but didn’t stop because they were on their way to somewhere else.”
“The very definition of a legend,” the woman said.
“It was a shipwreck,” Rory told Mai. “Castaways on a desert island. I’m sure it still happens on the high seas of Earth.”
“There are still shipwrecks,” Mai said. “Although everything is connected to everything else, so anyone who survives is likely to be found quickly.”
“The outer dark beyond Neptune is still largely uninhabited,” Rory said. “We haven’t yet finished cataloguing everything in the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc, and everything is most definitely not connected to everything else, out there. How the story goes, when the Quiet War heated up, a ship from the Jupiter system was hit by a drone as it approached Saturn. Its
motors were badly damaged and it ploughed through the Saturn system and kept going. It couldn’t decelerate, couldn’t reach anywhere useful. Its crew and passengers went into hibernation. Sixty or seventy years later, those still alive woke up. They were approaching a planetoid somewhat beyond the orbit of Pluto, had just enough reaction mass to match orbits with it.
“The ship was carrying construction machinery. The survivors used the raw tars and clays of the planetoid to build a habitat. A small bubble of air and light and heat, spun up to give a little gravity, farms and gardens on the inside, vacuum organisms growing on the outside, like the floating worldlets in the asteroid belt. They called it Fiddler’s Green, after an old legend from Earth about a verdant and uncharted island sometimes encountered by becalmed sailors. Perhaps you know it, Mai.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“They built a garden,” the young woman said, “but they didn’t ever try to call for help. How likely is that?”
Rory said, “Perhaps they didn’t call for help because they believed the Three Powers were still controlling the systems of Saturn and Jupiter. Or perhaps they were happy, living where they did. They didn’t need help. They didn’t want to go home because Fiddler’s Green was their home. The planetoid supplied all the raw material they required. The ship’s fusion generator gave them power, heat and light. They are still out there, travelling beyond the Kuiper belt. Living in houses woven from branches and leaves. Farming. Falling in love, raising families, dying. A world entire.”
“A romance of regression,” the young woman said.
“Perhaps it is no more than a fairytale,” Rory said. “But nothing in it is impossible. There are hundreds of places like Fiddler’s Green. Thousands. It’s just an outlier, an extreme example of how far people are prepared to go to make their own world, their own way of living.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 25
