He requested that she make a donation of DNA samples. It was logical — a scheme to keep mankind’s small, isolated gene pools refreshed — though she’d heard of travelers who had patronized a flourishing black market in traveler genetic samples, notably sperm; the latter-day legend, happily encouraged by some travelers, was that the good stuff from these crude near-barbarians from a thousand years ago was more vigorous, more potent than the etiolated modern vintage.
At last he handed her a piece of plastic embedded with temporary ident codes, preliminary to a full implant; she took it gravely. “You are welcome here,” he told her.
“Thank you.” She raised the issue of her companions from Triton.
“Their applications will be processed as speedily as possible.” He fell silent, his drawn face impassive.
She tapped the desk with a fingernail. She found it hard to read his posture, the language of his face. “They’ve flown across the system, across thirty astronomical units, in landers designed for hundred-kilometer orbital hops. Those things are flying toilets. We have children, old people, disabled, ill…”
“We are processing their applications. Until that is concluded there’s nothing I can do.”
His eyes were hollow. The man is exhausted, she thought. He is overwhelmed, as Mercury is; and here I am with more refugees, boatloads of resentful ice dwellers from Triton. In such circumstances, bureaucracy is a medium of civilized discourse; at least he isn’t throwing me out.
She resolved to be patient.
At the appointed time she set off to meet Dorothy. There was a monorail link from Chao City to Bernini — slow, bumpy, uncomfortable, real pioneer stuff — and then she had to take a ride in an automated tractor, a thing of giant wire-mesh wheels, over lightly occupied Mercury.
She arrived at what Dorothy had referred to as a solarsail farm.
Outside the tractor she studied the sky.
She could see few stars. Solar-sail ships swam, dimly visible, like sparks from a fire, swarming around Mercury’s equator, bringing more refugees. But there was a haze across the sky, a mistiness surrounding that too-large Sun disc, and a pale wash farther out, like a starless Milky Way. She was seeing the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere, made visible by the artificial occulting of the central star. And the flat belt of light farther out was the zodiacal light, the shining of dust particles and meteorites and asteroids in the plane of the ecliptic. Once Gaijin cities had shone there; now the asteroid belt was deserted once more.
When she cupped her hands around her faceplate she could see the tail of yet another giant comet, smeared milkily over the black dome of the sky. She couldn’t see any Cracker ships, of course — not yet — even though, it was said, they had broken through the orbit of Neptune.
As the Oort war had turned sour, Mercury had been annexed by a coalition of nations from the asteroid colonies: the near-Earths, the main belt, even a few from the Trojans in Jupiter’s orbit. It was hardly an occupation; nobody but a few hermit types had been living here anyhow. The setup here was barely democratic — a situation which, to their credit, appeared to disturb the emergency government, the Coalition. But it was functioning.
The colonists had adapted technologies that had once been used in the initial colonization of the Moon: Once more, humans were forced to bake their air out of unyielding rock. But there were plans for the longer term — such as a Paulis mine at Caloris Planitia, the giant impact crater she’d observed from orbit. But this was not the Moon. Mercury was all iron core, with a little rocky rind. A different world, different challenges.
Now she picked out a double star, a bright double pinpoint, one partner strikingly blue, the other a pale gray-white…
“Earth, of course.” Here was Dorothy standing close by her side, in a suit so coated with black Mercury dust it was all but invisible, despite the brightness of the Sun. Her helmet was heavily shielded, just a golden bubble; Madeleine couldn’t see her face.
They exchanged meaningless pleasantries, awkward; there were no obvious protocols for a relationship such as theirs.
Then Dorothy loped heavily across the dusty plain. Madeleine, reluctantly, followed.
The regolith crunched under her feet, the noise clearly audible, carried through her suit. In the virgin dust she left footprints, clear and sharp as on the Moon, and the dust she threw up clung to the fabric of her suit. But her footing was heavy, in this double-Moon gravity. No bunny-hop moonwalking here.
It was like the Moon, yes — the same undulating surface, heavily eroded, crater on crater, so the surface was like a sea of dusty waves. But if anything the erosion was more complete here. There were hills — she was close to the rim wall of crater Bernini — but they were stoop-shouldered, coated in regolith. The smaller craters were little more than shadows of themselves, palimpsests, their features worn away.
She hadn’t met Dorothy since they had been with Malenfant on the Gaijin’s home world and the three of them had set off to return to the Solar System by their different routes. Dorothy seemed different to Madeleine: more closed-in, secretive, perhaps obsessive. Somehow older.
Dorothy paused and pointed to a hole in the ground. “Here’s where I live. Subsurface shelter. It isn’t so bad. Not if you’ve already spent subjective years in spacecraft hab modules.”
At Madeleine’s feet was a flattened boulder, its exposed top worn smooth, like a lens. She bent stiffly, scuffed at the soil, and prised the rock out of the dirt. Most of the rock had been hidden in the dirt, like an iceberg. Underneath, it was sharp, a jagged boulder.
“It probably dropped here a billion years ago,” Dorothy said, “thrown halfway around the planet by some impact. And since then any bits of it that stuck out have just been eroded flat, right here where it landed, layer by layer.”
Madeleine frowned. “Micrometeorite impacts?”
“Not primarily. At noon it gets hot enough to melt lead. And in the night, which lasts nearly six months, it’s cold enough to liquefy oxygen.”
“Thermal stress, then.”
“Yes. Shaped the landscape. Bane of the engineer’s life, here on this hot little world. Come on. Let me show you what I do for a living.”
They walked briskly through a shallow crater littered with bits of glass.
That, anyhow, was how it seemed to Madeleine at first glance. She was surrounded by delicate glass leaves that rested against the regolith, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders, pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions, like miniature cannon muzzles. It was like a sculpture park.
Dorothy stalked on without pausing. Some of the petal-shaped glass plates were crushed under Dorothy’s careless feet; Madeleine walked more carefully. “We can just grow sail panels right out of the rock,” Dorothy said. “These things are gen-enged descendants of vacuum flowers from the Moon. I’ve made myself something of an expert at this technology. Good to have a profession, on a world where you have to pay for the air you breathe, don’t you think?” She tilted back her head, her face obscured. “Next time you see a solar sailing ship, think of this place, how those gauzy ships are born, morphing right out of the rocks at your feet. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
They walked on. Madeleine asked about Malenfant.
Dorothy shrugged. “I got back twenty years before you did. If he came directly back to the system after we parted, as he said he would, he might have arrived here centuries earlier yet. I don’t know what’s become of him.”
Madeleine studied her. “You’re troubled. The time we had on the Cannonball—”
“Not troubled, exactly. Guilty, perhaps.” She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic church’s first patent.”