Perhaps she has attempted to cleanse her memories of Malenfant, her guilt over her betrayal of him. That is how she has been able to achieve such distance from it.
But if so, she was only partially successful. For this action against the Crackers, whatever it is, will kill her, Madeleine realized.
And Nemoto is embracing the prospect.
Madeleine worked hard on Carl ap Przibram, trying to get him to take Nemoto’s advice seriously. It wasn’t easy, given her lack of any detailed understanding of what Nemoto might be trying to attempt. But at last he yielded and got her a slot before the Coalition’s top council.
It was an uneasy session. It took place in a steamy cave crammed with a hundred delegates from different factions, none of them natives, jammed in here against their will in the bowels of Mercury. There was a range of body types, she observed, mostly variants on the tall, stick-thin, low-gravity template; but there were a number of delegates adapted for zero gravity, even exotic atmospheres, in environment tanks, wheelchairs, and other supportive apparatus.
She faced rows of faces glaring with suspicion, fear, self-interest, even contempt. This wasn’t going to be easy. But she recognized, here in the main governing council, one of the women from the Triton transports, which had at last been allowed to land. These people were prickly, awkward, superstitious, fearful. But even in this dire strait, they welcomed refugees, and even gave them a place at the top table.
It made her obscurely proud. This is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome. This: even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.
She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feeta good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn’t always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.
Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good 60 percent of the planet’s population agreed to concur with Nemoto’s advice.
Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room and slept twelve hours.
The final evacuation was swift.
The remnants of humanity had fled inward, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop suborbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving Sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.
And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These ETs clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.
Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.
Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.
They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl’s body several times at least. On the way, she’d decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both — she suspected — secretly relieved.
Madeleine spent her last day on Mercury inside the Paulis mine in Caloris. This was a tube half a kilometer wide, the walls clear, the rocks beyond glowing orange-hot. It was the big brother of Frank Paulis’s first ancient well on the Moon. This mine had never been completed, and perhaps never would be; but now it served a new purpose as a deep shelter for the remnants of humanity.
Giant temporary floors of spider silk and aluminum had been spun out over the shaft, cut through by supply ducts and cabling and a giant firefighter’s pole of open elevators. Here — safe from radiation and the Sun’s heat and the shadow’s cold — half of Mercury’s population, a million strong, was being housed in flimsy bubbles of spider silk and aluminum. The Paulis tunnel wasn’t pressurized, of course, and so big flexible walkways ran between the bubbles. The floors were misty and translucent, as were the hab bubbles; and, looking down into the glowing pit of humanity, Madeleine could see people scattered over floor after floor, moving around their habs like microbes in droplets of water, receding into a misty, light-filled infinity.
It was well known she was planning to leave today. In the upper levels many faces were turned up to her — she could see them, just pale dots. She had always been isolated, especially in this latest of her parachute drops back into human history. Perhaps she was getting too old, too detached from the times. In fact she suspected the displaced Triton colonists rather resented her — as if she, who had guided them here, had somehow been responsible for the disaster that had befallen their home.
Anyhow, it was done. She turned her back on the glimmering interior of the Paulis mine, its cache of humans, and returned to the surface.
She flew up from Mercury, up through a cloud of Cracker ships.
Great sails were all around her. Even partly furled, theywere huge, spanning tens of kilometers, like pieces of filmy landscapes torn loose and thrown into the sky. Some of themhad been made transparent rather than furled, so that the bright light of the Sun shone through skeletal structures of shining threads. And the wings had a complex morphology, each warping and twisting and curling, presumably in response to the density of the light falling on it, and the thin shadows cast by its neighbors.
The Cracker ships sailed close to each other: in great layers, one over the other, sometimes barely half a kilometer apart, a tiny separation compared to the huge expanse of the wings. Sometimes they were so close that a curl in one wing would cause a rippling response in others, great stacks of the wings turning like the pages of an immense book. But Madeleine never once saw those great wings touch; the coordination was stunning.
Madeleine rose up through all this, just bulling her way through in her squat little Gaijin lander. The wonderful wings just curled out of her way.
At ten Mercury diameters, she looked back.
Mercury was a ball of rock, maybe the size of her palmheld at arm’s length. It looked as if it were wrapped in silverypaper, shifting layers of it, as if it were some huge Christmaspresent — or perhaps as if immense silvery wasps were crawling all over it. Quite remarkably beautiful, she thought. But, shereflected bitterly, if there was one thing she had learned in her long and dubious career, it was that beauty clung as closely to objects of killing and pain and horror as to the good; and so itwas here.
She stretched, weightless. She felt deeply — if shamefully — relieved to be alone once more, in control of her own destiny, without the complication of other people around her.
Nemoto called her from the surface.
“I’m surprised they let you through like that. The Crackers. You’re in a Gaijin ship, after all.”
“But the Gaijin are gone. The Crackers clearly don’t believe the Gaijin are a threat anymore. And they don’t even seem to have noticed us humans.” The Crackers are just kicking over the anthill, she thought, without even looking to see what was there, what we were.
“Meacher, how far out are you?”
“Ten diameters.”