Chapter 31

Endgame

In the final months, events unfolded with shocking rapidity. The great spherical fleet of Cracker vessels sailed inward — through the huge empty orbits of the outer planets, past abandoned asteroids, at last into the hot deep heart of the system.

One by one, all over the system, beacons were extinguished: on Triton, the asteroids, Mars, human stories concluded without witness, in the cold and dark.

The data miners found Nemoto — or, Madeleine thought, perhaps she consented to be found.

It turned out Nemoto had shunned the underground colonies. She was working on the surface, in an abandoned science base in a big, smooth-floored crater called Bach, some thousand kilometers north of Chao City.

Madeleine used the monorail to get to Bach. The rail was still functioning, for now; the encroaching Cracker ships had yet to interfere materially with Mercury in any way. Nevertheless there were no humans operating on the surface of Mercury, nobody amid the blindly toiling robots, diggers, and scrapers. And everywhere, tended by the robots or not, Madeleine saw the gleam of solar-sail flowers.

In the shade of an eroded-smooth crater wall, Nemoto was toiling at a plain of tilled regolith. Here, one of the glass-leafed arrays had spread out over the heat-shattered soil. Nemoto was hunched over, monklike, a slow patient figure redolent of age, tending her plants of glass and light.

The Sun was higher in the sky at this more northerly latitude, a ferocious ball, and Madeleine’s suit, gleaming silver, warned her frequently of excessive temperatures.

“Nemoto—”

Nemoto straightened up stiffly. She silenced Madeleine with a gesture, beckoned for her to come deeper into the shade, and pointed upward.

Madeleine lifted her visor. Gradually, as her eyes adapted, the stars came out. The sky’s geography was swamped, in one corner, by the extensive glare of the Sun’s corona.

But the stars were just a backdrop to a crowd of ships.

They were all around Mercury now, spread out through three-dimensional space like a great receding cloud of dragonflies frozen in flight. Loose clusters of them already orbited the planet, looping east and west, north and south, cupping the light. And farther out there was a ragged swarm still on the way, reaching back to the hidden Sun, around which these misty invaders had sailed.

Their filmy, silvery wings were caught folded or twisted, in the act of shifting better to catch the Sun’s light. The spread of those gauzy wings was huge, some of them thousands of kilometers across. These were no trivial inner-system skimmers, as humans had built, made to sail in the dense light winds close to the Sun; these were giant interstellar schooners, capable of traveling across light-years, through spaces where the brightest, largest star was reduced to a point.

Not dragonflies, she thought. Locusts. For not one of those ships was human, Madeleine knew, or even Gaijin. Nothing but Crackers.

“It’s remarkable to watch them,” Nemoto breathed. “I mean, over hours or days. Simply to stand here and watch. You can see them deploying their sails, you know. The sunlight pushes outward from the Sun, of course. But they sail in toward the Sun by tacking into the light: they lose a little orbital velocity, and then simply fall inward. But sailing ships that size are slow to maneuver. They must have been plotting their courses, here to Mercury, all the way in from the Oort cloud.”

“I wonder what the sails are made of,” Madeleine said.

Nemoto grunted. “Nothing we have ever been capable of. Maybe the Gaijin would know. Only diamond fiber would be strong enough for the rigging. And as for the sails, the best we can do is aluminized spider silk. Much too thick and heavy for ships of that size. Perhaps they grow the sails by some kind of vacuum deposition, molecule by molecule. Or perhaps they are masters of nanotech.”

“They really are coming, aren’t they, Nemoto?”

Nemoto turned, face hidden. “Of course they are. We are both too old for illusion, Meacher. They are wasps around a honey pot, which is Mercury’s fat iron core.”

Together, they walked around the spreading array, glass flowers that sparkled with the light of stars and ET ships.

Madeleine tried to talk to Nemoto, to draw her out. After all, their acquaintance — never friendship — went back across sixteen hundred years, to that steamy office in Kourou, a tank of spinning Chaera on the pre-Paulis Moon. But Nemoto wouldn’t talk of her life, her past: she would talk of nothing but the great issues of the day, Mercury and the Crackers and the great ET colonization pulse all around them, the huge and impersonal.

Madeleine wondered if that was normal.

But there was nothing normal about a woman who had lived through seventeen centuries, for God’s sake. Nemoto was probably the oldest human being who had ever lived; to survive, Nemoto must have put herself through endless reengineering, of both body and mind. And, unlike the lonely star travelers, she had lived through all those years on worlds full of people: Earth, the Moon, Mercury. Her biography must run like an unbroken thread through the tangled tapestry of a millennium and a half of human history.

But Madeleine truthfully knew little of this ancient, enigmatic woman. Had she ever married, ever fallen in love? Had she ever had children? And if so, were they alive — or had she outlived generation after generation of descendants? Perhaps nobody knew, nobody but Nemoto herself. And Nemoto would talk of none of this, refused to be drawn as she tended her plants of glass.

But in her slow-moving, aged way, she seemed focused, Madeleine thought. Determined, vigorous. Almost happy. As if she had a mission.

Madeleine decided to challenge her.

She walked among the glassy leaves. She bent, awkwardly, and picked up a glimmering leaf; it broke away easily. It was very fine, fragile. When she crushed it carelessly, it crumbled.

Nemoto made a small move toward her, a silent admonition.

Madeleine dropped the leaf carefully. “I’ve been reading up,” she said.

“You have?”

“On you. On your, umm, career.” She waved a hand at the leaves. “I think I know what you’re doing here.”

“Tell me.”

“Moon flowers. You brought them here, to Mercury. This isn’t just about growing solar sails. There are Moon flowers all over this damn planet. You’ve been seeding them, haven’t you?”

Nemoto hunkered down and studied the plant before her. “They grow well here. The sunlight, you see. I gen-enged them — if you can call it that; the genetic material of these flowers is stored in a crystalline substrate that is quite different from our biochemistry. Well. I removed some unnecessary features.”

“Unnecessary?”

“The rudimentary nervous system. The traces of consciousness.”

“Nemoto — why? Will dying Mercury become a garden?”

“What do you think, Meacher?”

“That you’re planning to fight back. Against the Crackers.You are remarkable, Nemoto. Even now, even here, you continue the struggle… And these flowers have something to do with it.”

Nemoto was as immobile as her flowers, the delicate glass petals reflected in her visor. “I wonder how they started,” she said. “The Crackers. How they began this immense, destructive odyssey. Have you ever thought about that? Surely no species intends to become a breed of rapacious interstellar locusts. Perhaps they were colonists on some giant starship, a low-tech, multigeneration ark. But when they got to their destination they’d gotten too used to spaceflight. So they built more ships, and just kept going… Perhaps the gimmick — blowing up the target Sun for an extra push — came later. And once they’d worked out how to do it, reaped the benefits, they couldn’t resist using it. Over and over.”