The outers talked about that. Mai told about her life in al-Iskandariyya, her childhood, her father’s work, her work in the Department of Antiquities, the project she’d recently seen to completion, the excavation of a twenty-first-century shopping mall that had been buried in a sandstorm during the Overturn. At last there was a general agreement that they should sleep. The outers retired to hammocks or cocoons; Mai made her bed on the ground, under the spreading branches of a grandfather oak, uneasy and troubled, aware as she had not been, in her cubicle in the port hostel, of the freezing vacuum beyond the dome’s high transparent roof. It was night inside the dome, and night outside, too. Stars shining hard and cold beyond the black shadows of the trees.
Everything that seemed natural here—the ring forest, the lawns, the dense patches of vegetables and herbs—was artificial. Fragile. Vulnerable. Mai tried and failed to imagine living in a little bubble so far from the sun that it was no more than the brightest star in the sky. She fretted about the task that lay ahead, the trek to the secret place where she and Lexi Truex would scatter Thierry’s ashes.
At last sleep claimed her, and she dreamed of hanging over the Nile and its patchwork borders of cotton fields, rice fields, orchards and villages, everything falling away, dwindling into tawny desert as she fell into the endless well of the sky…
It was a silly anxiety dream, but it stayed with Mai as she and Lexi Truex drove north to a station on the railway that girdled Dione’s equator, and boarded the diamond bullet of a railcar and sped out across the battered plain. They were accompanied by Thierry’s mule, Archie. A sturdy robot porter that, with its flat loadbed, small front-mounted sensor turret, and three pairs of articulated legs, somewhat resembled a giant cockroach. Archie carried spare airpacks and a spray pistol device, and refused to tell Mai and Lexi their final destination, or why it was important that they reach it before sunrise. Everything would become clear when they arrived, it said.
According to Lexi, the pistol used pressurized water vapor from flash-heated ice to spray material from pouches plugged into its ports, such as the pouch of gritty powder, the residue left from resomation of Thierry’s body, or the particles of thixotropic plastic in a pouch already plugged into the pistol. The same kind of plastic Macy Minnot and her partner had used to shape ice dust into snowmen.
“We’re going to spray-paint something with the old man’s ashes,” Lexi said. “That much is clear. The question is, what’s the target?”
Archie refused to answer her in several polite ways.
The railcar drove eastward through the night. Like almost all of Saturn’s moons, like Earth’s Moon, Dione’s orbital period, some sixty-six hours, was exactly equal to the time it took to complete a single rotation on its axis, so that one side permanently faced Saturn. Its night was longer than an entire day, on Earth.
Saturn’s huge bright crescent sank westward as the train crossed a plain churned and stamped with craters. Every so often, Mai spotted the fugitive gleam of the dome or angular tent of a settlement. A geometric fragment of chlorophyll green gleaming in the moonscape’s frozen battlefield. A scatter of bright lights in a small crater. Patchworked fields of black vacuum organisms spread across tablelands and slopes, plantations of what looked like giant sunflowers standing up along ridges, all of them facing east, waiting for the sun.
The elevated railway shot out across a long and slender bridge that crossed the trough of Eurotas Chasmata, passing over broad slumps of ice that descended into a river of fathomless shadow. The far side was fretted with lesser canyons and low bright cliffs rising stepwise with broad benches between. The railway turned north to follow a long pass that cut between high cliffs, bent eastwards again. At last, a long ridge rolled up from the horizon: the southern flanks of the rimwall of Amata crater.
The railcar slowed, passed through a short tunnel cut through a ridge, ran through pitch-black shadow beyond and out into Saturnshine, and sidled into a station cantilevered above a slope. Below, a checkerboard of scablike vacuum organisms stretched towards the horizon. Above, the dusty slope, spattered with small, sharp craters, rose to a gently scalloped edge, stark against the black sky.
Several rolligons were parked in the garage under the station. Following Archie’s instructions, Lexi and Mai climbed into one of the vehicles (Archie sprang onto the flat roof) and drove along a track that slanted towards the top of the slope. After five kilometers, the track topped out on a broad bench, swung around a shelter, a stubby cylinder jutting under a heap of fresh white ice blocks, a way point for hikers and climbers on their way into the interior of the huge crater, and followed the curve of the bench eastward until it was interrupted by a string of small craters twenty or thirty meters across.
Lexi and Mai climbed out and Lexi rechecked Mai’s p-suit and they followed Archie around the smashed bowls of the craters. There were many bootprints trampled into the dust. Thierry’s prints, coming and going. Mai tried not to step on them. Strange to think they might last for millions of years.
“It is not far,” Archie said, responding to Lexi’s impatient questions. “It is not far.”
Mai felt a growing glee as she loped along, felt that she could bounce away like the children in the habitat, leap over ridges, cross craters in a single bound, span this little world in giant footsteps. She’d felt like this when her first grandchild had been born. Floating on a floodtide of happiness and relief. Free of responsibility. Liberated from the biological imperative.
Now and then her pressure suit beeped a warning; once, when she exceeded some inbuilt safety parameter, it took over and slowed her headlong bounding gait and brought her to a halt, swaying at the dust-softened rim of a small crater. Reminding her that she was dependent on the insulation and integrity of her own personal space ship, its native intelligence, the whisper of oxygen in her helmet.
On the far side of the crater, cased in her extravagantly decorated p-suit, Lexi turned with a bouncing step, asked Mai if she was okay.
“I’m fine!”
“You’re doing really well,” Lexi said, and asked Archie for the fifth or tenth time if they were nearly there.
“It is not far.”
Lexi waited as Mai skirted the rim of the crater with the bobbing shuffle she’d been taught, and they went on. Mai was hyperaware of every little detail in the moonscape. Everything fresh and strange and new. The faint flare of Saturnshine on her helmet visor. The rolling blanket of gritty dust, dimpled with tiny impacts. Rayed scatterings of sharp bright fragments. A blocky ice-boulder as big as a house perched in a shatter of debris. The gentle rise and fall of the ridge, stretching away under the black sky where untwinkling stars showed everywhere. Saturn’s crescent looming above the western horizon. The silence and stillness of the land. The stark reality of it.
She imagined her father walking here, under this same sky. Alone in a moonscape where no trace of human activity could be seen.
The last and largest crater was enclosed by ramparts of ice blocks three stories high and cemented with a silting of dust. Archie didn’t hesitate, climbing a crude stairway hacked into the ice and plunging through a ragged cleft. Lexi and Mai followed, and the crater’s bowl opened below them, tilted towards the plain beyond the curve of the ridge. The spark of the sun stood just above the horizon. An arc of light defined the far edge of the moonscape; sunlight lit a segment of the crater’s floor, where boulders lay tumbled amongst a maze of bootprints and drag marks.
“At least we got the timing right,” Lexi said.
“What are we supposed to be seeing?” Mai said.
Lexi asked Archie the same question.
“It will soon become apparent.”
They stood side by side, Lexi and Mai, wavering in the faint grip of gravity. The sunlit half of the crater directly in front of them, the dark half beyond, shadows shrinking back as the sun slowly crept into the sky. And then they saw the first shapes emerging.
Columns or tall vases. Cylindrical, woman-sized or large
r. Different heights in no apparent order. Each one shaped from translucent ice tinted with pastel shades of pink and purple, and threaded with networks of darker veins.
Lexi stepped down the broken blocks of the inner slope and moved across the floor. Mai followed.
The nearest vases were twice their height. Lexi reached out to one of them, brushed the fingertips of her gloved hand across the surface.
“These have been hand-carved,” she said. “You can see the tool marks.”
“Carved from what?”
“Boulders, I guess. He must have carried the ice chips out of here.”
They were both speaking softly, reluctant to disturb the quiet of this place. Lexi said that the spectral signature of the ice corresponded with artificial photosynthetic pigments. She leaned close, her visor almost kissing the bulge of the vase, reported that it was doped with microscopic vacuum organisms.
“There are structures in here, too,” she said. “Long fine wires. Flecks of circuitry.”
“Listen,” Mai said.
“What?”
“Can’t you hear it?”
It was a kind of interference on the common band Mai and Lexi were using to talk. Faint and broken. Hesitant. Scraps of pure tones rising and fading, rising again.
“I hear it,” Lexi said.
The sound grew in strength as more and more vases emerged into sunlight. Long notes blending into a polyphonic harmony.
The microscopic vacuum organisms were soaking up sunlight, Lexi said, after a while. Turning light into electricity, powering something that responded to changes in the structure of the ice. Strain gauges perhaps, coupled to transmitters.
“The sunlight warms the ice, ever so slightly,” she said. “It expands asymmetrically, the embedded circuitry responds to the microscopic stresses…”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes…”
It was beautiful. A wild, aleatory chorus rising and falling in endless circles above the ground of a steady bass pulse…
They stood there a long time, while the vases sang. There were a hundred of them, more than a hundred. A field or garden of vases. Clustered like organ pipes. Standing alone on shaped pedestals. Gleaming in the sunlight. Stained with cloudy blushes of pink and purple. Singing, singing.
At last, Lexi took Mai’s gloved hand and led her across the crater floor to where the robot mule, Archie, was waiting. Mai took out the pouch of human dust and they plugged it into the spray pistol’s spare port. Lexi switched on the pistol’s heaters, showed Mai how to use the simple trigger mechanism.
“Which one shall we spray?” Mai said.
Lexi smiled behind the fishbowl visor of her helmet.
“Why not all of them?”
They took turns. Standing well back from the vases, triggering brief bursts of gritty ice that shot out in broad fans and lightly spattered the vases in random patterns. Lexi laughed.
“The old bastard,” she said. “It must have taken him hundreds of days to make this. His last and best secret.”
“And we’re his collaborators,” Mai said.
It took a while to empty the pouch. Long before they had finished, the music of the vases had begun to change, responding to the subtle shadow patterns laid on their surfaces.
At last the two woman had finished their work and stood still, silent, elated, listening to the music they’d made.
That night, back under the dome of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat, Mai thought of her father working in that unnamed crater high on the rimwall of Amata crater. Chipping at adamantine ice with chisels and hammers. Listening to the song of his vases, adding a new voice, listening again. Alone under the empty black sky, happily absorbed in the creation of a sound garden from ice and sunlight.
And she thought of the story of Fiddler’s Green, the bubble of light and warmth and air created from materials mined from the chunk of tarry ice it orbited. Of the people living there. The days of exile becoming a way of life as their little world swung further and further away from the sun’s hearthfire. Green days of daily tasks and small pleasures. Farming, cooking, weaving new homes in the hanging forest on the inside of the bubble’s skin. A potter shaping dishes and bowls from primordial clay. Children chasing each other, flitting like schools of fish between floating islands of trees. The music of their laughter. The unrecorded happiness of ordinary life, out there in the outer dark.
What Did Tessimond Tell You?
Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts [www.adamroberts.com] lives in England, a little to the west of London, with his wife and children. He has published fourteen novels, the most recent being Jack Glass and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea. Coming up is a major new short story collection, Adam Robots: Short Stories.
1
The Nobel was in the bag (not that I would ever want to hide it away in a bag—), and in fact we were only a fortnight from our public announcement, when Niu Jian told me he was quitting. I assumed it was a joke. Niu Jian had never been much of a practical joker, but that’s what I assumed. Of course, he wasn’t kidding in the slightest. The sunlight picked out the grain of his tweed jacket. He was sitting in my office with his crescent back to the window, and I kept getting distracted by the light coming through the glass. Morningtime, morningtime, and all the possibilities of the day ahead of us. The chimney of the boilerhouse as white and straight as an unsmoked cigarette. The campus Willow was dangling its green tentacles in the river, as if taking a drink. The students wandered the paths and dawdled on the grass with their arms around one another’s waists. Further down the hill, beyond the campus-boundary, I could see the cars doing their crazy corpuscle impressions along the interchange and away along the dual carriageway. “You want to quit—now?” I pressed. “Now is the time you want to quit?”
He nodded, slowly, and picked at the skin of his knuckles.
“Two weeks, we present. You know the Nobel is—look, hey!” I said, the idea occurring suddenly to me like the spurt of a match lighting. “Is it that you think you won’t be sharing? You will! You, me, Prévert and Sleight, we will all be cited. Is that what you think?” It wouldn’t have been very characteristic of Niu Jian to storm out like a prima donna, I have to say: a more stolidly dependable individual never walked the face of this, our rainy stony earth. But, you see, I was struggling to understand why he was quitting.
“It is not that,” he said,
“Then—?” I made a grunting noise. Then I coughed. P-O-R didn’t like that; the unruly diaphragm. There was a scurry of motion inside, as she readjusted herself.
He looked at me, and then, briefly, he glanced at my belly—I had pushed my chair away from the desk, so my whole torso was on display, Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator in all her bulging glory. Then he looked back at my face. For the strangest moment my heart knocked rat-tat at my ribs, like it wanted out, and I felt the adrenal flush along my neck and in my cheeks. But that passed. My belly had nothing to do with that.
Niu Jian said: “I have never been to Mecca.”
“The Bingo?” I said. I wasn’t trying to be facetious. I was genuinely wrongfooted by this.
“No,” he said.
“You mean, in—” I coughed, “like, Arabia?”
“There, yes.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I want,” said Niu Jian, “to go.”
“OK,” I said. “Why not? It’s like the Taj Mahal, right? I’m sure it’s a sight to see. So go. Wait until the press conference, and then take the next available flying transport from Heathrow’s internationally renowned port-of-air.” But he was shaking his head, so I said: “Jesus, go now if you like. If you must. Miss the announcement. That doesn’t matter—or it only matters a little bit. But if it’s like, urgent, then go now. But you don’t have to quit! Why do you have to quit? You don’t have to quit.”
His nod, though wordless, was very clearly: I do.
“OK, Noo-noo, you’re really going to have
to lay this out for me, step by baby-step,” I said. “Blame my baby-beshrunken brain. Walk me through it. Why do you want to go to Mecca?”
“To go before I die.”
“Wait—you’re not dying, are you? Jesus on a boson, are you ill?”
“I’m not ill,” said Niu Jian. “I’m in perfect health. So far as I know, anyway. Look: I’m not trying to be mysterious. All Muslims must visit Mecca once in their lives.”
I thought about this. “You’re a Muslim? I thought you were Chinese.”
“One can be both.”
“And that bottle of wine you shared with Prévert and myself last night, in the Godolfin?”
“Islam is perfect, individuals are not.” He picked more energetically at the skin on the back of his knuckles.
“I just never knew,” I said, feeling stupid. “I mean, I thought Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol.”
“I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to drink alcohol,” he returned, and for the first time in this whole strange conversation I got a glimpse of the old Niu Jian, the sly little flash of wit, the particular look he had. But then it was gone again. “Yesterday, in the Elephant, you were talking about the suit you would wear for the press conference. You were all, oh my mother will be watching the television, the whole world will be watching the—oh I must have a smart suit. Oh I must go to a London tailor. What happened to the London tailor?”
He said: “I spoke to Tessimond.”
I believe this was the first time I ever heard his name. Not the last; very much not the last time. “Who?”
“Prévert’s friend.”
“Oh—the doleful-countenance guy? The ex-professor guy from Oregon?”
“Yes.”
“You spoke to him—when?”
Niu Jian looked at the ceiling. “Half an hour ago.”
“And he told you to quit the team? C’mon, Noo-noo! Why listen to him?”
“He didn’t tell me to quit the team.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 26
