Madeleine forced a smile. “Pleased to meet you. Who are you, the mayor?”

The woman frowned and jabbered back impatiently.

But Madeleine smiled and nodded, and tapped her helmet. “That’s it. Keep talking. My name is Madeleine Meacher. I’ve come from the stars…”

Her translator suite was essentially Gaijin. How ironic that seventeen centuries after the Gaijin came wandering unannounced into the asteroid belt, humans should need alien technology to talk to each other.

At last the translator began to whisper.

“At last. Thanks for your patience. I—”

“And I am very busy,” the translator whispered, ghosting the woman’s speech. “We should progress this issue, the issue of your arrival here.”

“My name is Meacher…” Madeleine summarized her CV.

The woman turned out to be called Sheela Dell-Cope. She was an administrative assistant in the office of the headman here — although, as far as Madeleine could make out, the headman was actually a woman.

“I have a mission,” Madeleine said. “I bring bad news. Bad news from the stars.”

The woman silenced her with an upraised hand. “There is the question of your residency, including the appropriate fee…”

Madeleine was forced to sit through a long and elaborate list of rules regarding temporary residency. To Dell-Cope, Madeleine Meacher was strange, incomprehensible, a visitor from another time, another place. Now I am the Gaijin, Madeleine thought.

She was going to have to apply for the equivalent of a visa. And she would have to pay for each day she stayed, or else work for her air. This was a closed, marginal world, where every breath had to be paid for.

“The work is not pleasant,” Dell-Cope said. “Servicing the otec. Or working with the Flips, for instance.”

That meant nothing to Madeleine, but she got the idea. “I’ll pay.” She had a variety of Gaijin high-tech gadgets that she could use for a fee. Anyhow she wasn’t going to be here long, come what may.

As it turned out, the painting on the wall was a representation of an ancient Aboriginal artwork: the Dreaming of a creature of the Australian Outback, the honey ant. But it was a copy of a copy of a copy, done in seaweed dyes. And, she was prepared to bet, nobody on Triton knew what a honey ant was anyhow.

She was given a room in a residential area. There seemed to be no hotels here.

The room was just a cube carved out of concrete. It had a bed, some scattered and unfamiliar furniture — spindly low-gravity chairs — a small galley, and a comms station with an utterly baffling human interface.

Not that the galley was so easy either. She shouted at it and poked it, her favored way of dealing with newfangled technology, until she found a way to make it decant a hot liquid, some kind of tea.

There were no windows. The room was just a concrete box, a sarcophagus, a cave. Here in the emptiness on the edge of interstellar space, humans were hiding from the sky.

What are you doing here, Meacher?

What was she supposed to do? Simply blurt out her news — that an alien invasion fleet had massed on the rim of the Solar System, that it was almost certain to spill into the region of Neptune’s orbit soon, that she was here, with her friendly Gaijin, to help these people evacuate to worlds their ancestors had left behind a thousand years earlier? It seemed absurd, melodramatic.

She worked at the comms equipment, striving to make it do what she wanted. It was a strange irony, she thought, that comms equipment, whose purpose was after all to join people together, always turned out to have the most baffling designs, presenting the worst challenges to the out-of-time traveler.

She tried to make an appointment to meet the headman, but she was stalled. She tried farther down the local hierarchy, as best she could figure it out, but got nowhere there either.

Nobody was interested in her.

Frustrated, on a whim, she decided to hunt for descendants of the colonists she had known. With the help of her translator she asked the comms station to find her people with “Roach” in their surname.

Most of the surnames scrolling before her, phonetically rendered, were unfamiliar. But there were a few families with compound surnames that included the name “Rush.”

Just around the corner, in fact, in the same floating bubble as this room, there was a man — apparently living alone — with the surname Rush-Bayley.

She spent a frustrating hour persuading the comms unit to leave him a message.

She took long walks through the city’s emptiness. Lights turned themselves on, then off again when she passed, so she walked in a moving puddle of illumination.

She walked from bubble to floating bubble over bridges of what seemed to be ceramic; when the bubbles shifted against each other, the interfaces creaked, ominously. She encountered few people. Her footsteps echoed, as if she were walking through immense hangars.

Madeleine imagined this place had been designed for ten, twenty times as many people as it held now. And she thought of those other colonies, abandoned on the waters of Triton.

It saddened her that nothing — save a few sentimental tokens like paintings — survived of the Aboriginal culture that Ben’s generation had brought here. After all, even fifteen hundred years on Triton were dwarfed by maybe sixty thousand years of Australia. But the Dreamtime legends, it seemed, had not survived the translation from the ancient deserts of Australia to these enclosed, high-tech bubbles.

She reached the center of the kilometers-wide colony. Here, a great structure loomed out of the ice-crusted sea, visible through picture windows. It was mounted on a stalk, and it reared up to a great dome-shaped carapace some hundreds of meters above the ice. It was a little like a water tower. She picked out engineering features: evaporators, demisters, generators, turbines, condenser tubing. Madeleine learned that this tower was based on a taproot that descended far into the ocean, kilometers deep, in fact.

This was the otec. The name turned out to be an acronym from old English, for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. It was a device to extract energy from the heat difference between the deep ocean waters, at just four degrees below freezing, and the surface ice, at more than a hundred below. The otec turned out to be the main power source for the colony. It was fifteen hundred years old, as old as the colony itself, and it was maintained by the colonists with a diligent, monkish devotion. There were other power sources, like fusion plants. But the colonists were short of metal; the nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometers of water. The colonists were able to fix the otec, clunky machinery through it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.

After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.

It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.

Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smocklike affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colors — red, blue, green — a contrast to the drab environment.

He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.

He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How could he be like Ben, sixty generations removed?

His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name — and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. “You’re the same Madeleine Meacher who—”

“Yes.”

“How very strange. Of course we have records.” He smiled. “There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.”