Gramm was waddling at a speed obviously uncomfortable for him, and though the dome’s air was cool he was sweating heavily. “Nilis, we may be far from home. But you are a Commissary, and I suggest you comport yourself like one.”

“I am suitably abashed,” Nilis said dryly.

“But you must remember,” Faya Parz said, “that this is a place of history, not just engineering. Many of those first starships were crewed not by explorers but by refugees.”

Nilis said, “You’re talking about jasofts,” he said.

Torec said, “Jasofts?”

“Or pharaohs,” Faya said with a black-toothed smile.

It was an ancient, tangled, difficult story.

Nilis said, “Before the Qax Occupation, aging was defeated. The Qax withdrew the anti-agathic treatments and death returned to Earth. But some humans, called jasofts or pharaohs, were rewarded for their work for the Qax with immortality treatments — the Qax’s own this time. Made innately conservative by age, selfish and self-centered, utterly dependent on the Qax — well. Those new immortals were ideal collaborators.”

Faya Parz said unemotionally, “That’s judgmental. Some would say the jasofts ameliorated the cruelty of the Qax. Without them, the Occupation would have been much more severe. Nothing of human culture might have survived the Qax Extirpation. The species itself might have become extinct.”

Gramm waved his hand. “Or the jasofts were war criminals. Whatever. It’s a debate twenty thousand years old, and will never be resolved. When the Occupation collapsed, the new Coalition hunted down the last jasofts.”

Nilis nodded. “And so ships like the Mayflower were built, and crews of jasofts fled Sol system. Or tried to. We don’t know the meaning of the name, by the way: Mayflower. Perhaps some archaic pre- Occupation reference… In the end, Port Sol itself became one of the last refuges of jasofts in Sol system.”

With an almost soundless footstep, Luru Parz approached them. She said, “And of course it all had to be cleaned out, by the fresh-faced soldiers of the Coalition.”

Gramm snapped, “Did you bring us here to shock us with this revolting bit of history, Luru Parz?”

“You know why you’re here, Minister,” Luru Parz said, and she laughed in his face.

Gramm said nothing. But as he glared at Luru Parz, his eyes burned bright with hatred.

The ostensible purpose of this long trip was a discussion of the future of Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant. So Luru Parz led Nilis, Gramm, and Pila to a conference room, leaving Pirius and Torec in the charge of Faya Parz.

Faya asked if the ensigns wanted to rest, but they had spent days cooped up on a corvette, and were anxious to see the rest of Port Sol. Faya complied with good grace.

They began a slow circuit of the Pit of the Mayflower.

The great domed quarry was surrounded by a ring of satellite domes, each much smaller, with further facilities beyond that. In the unpressurized areas beyond the domes Pirius recognized power plants, landing pads, clusters of sensors, telescopes peering up at the star-ridden sky. No weapons, though; evidently this ancient, enigmatic place was not expected to be a target, for the Xeelee or anybody else.

These were obviously modern facilities. The more ancient landscape of Port Sol — the old starship quarries, the fallen towns, the imploded domes — was tantalizingly hidden beyond a tight horizon.

The domes were mostly occupied by laboratories, study areas, and living quarters. But it was a bleak, functional environment. In the labs and living areas there was a total lack of personalization: no Virtuals, no artwork, no entertainment consoles, not so much as a graffito. There were tight regulations about that sort of thing on Arches Base — across the Druzite Galaxy, personality was officially frowned on as a distraction from duty — but despite their superficial sameness every bunk in every corridor on every level of a Barracks Ball was subtly different, modified to reflect the personality of its owner. Not here, though; the people who manned this place must have extraordinary discipline.

Not that there were many people here at all, as far as the ensigns could see. Once they glimpsed somebody working in a lab, a place of shining metallic equipment and anonymous white boxes. Overshadowed by immense Virtual schematics of what looked like a DNA molecule, Pirius couldn’t even see if it was a man or woman.

“Not many of us are needed,” Faya Parz said. “There are only twenty-three of us, including Luru Parz. But Luru Parz travels a good deal nowadays.”

Torec shivered. Pirius knew what she was thinking. To a Navy brat, used to the crowds of Barracks Balls, that was a terribly small number, this an awfully remote and isolated place: to think there were no more than twenty-two other humans within billions of kilometers…

“The machines do all the work — even most of the analytical work. Humans are here to direct, to set objectives, to provide the final layer of interpretation.”

Torec said, “Don’t you get lonely? How do you live?”

Faya smiled. You don’t understand. It was a look Pirius had grown used to among the sophisticated population of Earth, but he suspected uneasily that here it might be true.

Faya said, “We have always been an odd lot, I suppose. An ice moon is a small place, short of resources. There were only ever a few of us, even in the great days. We would travel to other moons for trade, cultural exchange, to find partners — we still do. But there was no room to spare; population numbers always had to be controlled tightly. So marriage and children were matters for the community to decide, not for lovers.” Her voice was wistful, and Pirius wondered what ancient tragedies lay hidden beneath these bland words. “You know, in the olden days there were floating cities. There was dancing.”

Oddly, she sounded as if she remembered such times herself — as if she had once danced among these fallen palaces. Faya seemed heavy, static, dark, worn out by time, like a lump of rock from the Moon. It was hard to imagine her ever having been young, ever dancing.

Torec asked, “What do you do here?”

Faya said, “We study dark matter.”

“Why?”

“Because Luru Parz seeks to understand alien tampering with the evolution of Sol system.”

Torec and Pirius dared to share a glance. They’re all mad.

Pirius knew, in theory, about dark matter. It was an invisible shadow of normal matter, the “light” matter made of protons and neutrons. The dark stuff interacted with normal matter only through gravity. You couldn’t burn it, push it away, or harvest it, save with a gravity well. And it was harmless, passing through light matter as if it weren’t there. Pilots and navigators were taught to recognize its presence; sometimes great reefs of the stuff could cause gravitational anomalies that might affect your course.

Aside from that, dark matter was of no consequence. Pirius couldn’t see why anybody would study it.

But Faya showed them Virtuals. Sol system had coalesced out of a disc of material that had once stretched much farther than the orbit of the farthest planets. Most of the mass of the disc was now locked up in the bodies of the planets, but if you smeared out the planets’ masses, you got a fairly smooth curve, showing how the mass in the disc had dropped off evenly as distance from the sun increased, just as you’d expect.

“Until you get to Neptune,” Faya said. At the rim of the Kuiper Belt the actual mass distribution plummeted sharply. “There are many bodies out here, some massive. Pluto is one, Port Sol another… But they add up to only about a fifth of Earth’s mass. There should have been thousands of worldlets the size of Pluto or larger. Something removed all those planetesimals — and long ago, when Sol system was very young.”