“Where what?”

“Where do you want to go, on your health cruise?”

“I don’t care. What does it matter?”

“There might be something suitable,” Nemoto said at length. “There is another alien species, here in the Earth-Moon system. Did you know that? They are called the Chaera. Their star system is exotic. It includes a miniature black hole, which… Well.” She eyed Madeleine. “Your friend Ben is a black-hole specialist. Perhaps he will go with you. How amusing.”

Amusing. Another little relativistic death.

There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometers away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster’s slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line — startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps — as the Ariane rolled on its axis.

“There,” Nemoto said. “You made me miss the launch.”

Chapter 15

Colonists

Six months.

Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life — her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben — all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

She’d met other star travelers who had returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travelers journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

It wasn’t just the Discontinuity. She didn’t belong here. After all, she couldn’t even work the toilets.

She longed to leave.

The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artifacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

She walked away from the lander.

The colors of the Moon weren’t strong; in fact, the most colorful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminum-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon’s equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the Sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the Sun itself. How strange that will be.

Nemoto was showing Ben the various artifacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. “A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused…”

These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?” Madeleine asked.

“That’s not your concern.”

The habitat that would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvization and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly remembered Friendship-7. It was based on two modules — a Russian-built one called FGB, and the American-built Service Module — scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.

Madeleine slipped her gloved hand into Ben’s. “We ought to name our magnificent ship,” she said.

Ben thought it over. “Dreamtime Ancestor.”

“Come meet the Chaera,” Nemoto said.

The last artifact, sitting on the regolith, was a tank, a glass cube. It contained a translucent disc about a meter across, swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid.

It was an ET: a Chaera, an inhabitant of the black-hole system that was the destination of this mission. The Chaera had, after the Gaijin, been the second variant of ET to come to the Solar System.

Aside from all the dead ones in the past, of course.

Ben stepped forward. He touched the glass walls of the tank with his gloved hand. The Chaera rippled; it looked something like a stingray. She wondered if it was trying to talk to Ben.

The Chaera had eyes, she saw: four of them spaced evenly around the rim of the stingray shape, dilating lids alternately opening. Humanlike eyes, gazing out at her, eyes on a creature from another star. She shivered with recognition.

Through a hairline crack in the Chaera’s tank, fluid bubbled and boiled into vacuum.

“You need to understand that the nature of this mission is a little different,” Nemoto said. “You are going to a populated system. The Chaera have technology, it seems, but they lack spaceflight. The Gaijin made contact with them and initiated a trading relationship. The Chaera requested specific artifacts, which we’ve been able to supply.” She grunted. “Interesting. The Gaijin actually seem to be learning to run rudimentary trading relationships from us. Before, perhaps they simply appropriated, or killed.”

“Killed?” Ben said. “Your view of the Gaijin is harsh indeed, Nemoto.”

“What are the Gaijin getting from the Chaera in return for this?” Madeleine asked.

“We don’t know. The Chaera spend their days quietly in the service of their God. And their requirement, it seems, is simple. You will help them talk to God.”

“With an X-ray laser?” Ben asked dryly.

“Just focus on the science,” Nemoto said, sounding weary. “Learn about black holes, and about the Gaijin. That’s what you’re being sent for. Don’t worry about the rest.”

The Chaera swam like melting glass, glimmering in Earthlight.

Ben Roach seemed to sense her urgency, her longing for time to pass.

He offered to take her to Australia, to show her places where he’d grown up. “You ought to reconnect a little. No matter how far you travel, you’re still made of Earth atoms: rock and water.”

“Aborigine philosophy?” she asked, a little dismissive.

“If you like. The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die. There are stories that humans have already died, out there among the stars. Their atoms can’t return to the Earth. And, conversely, there are Gaijin here.”

“None of the Gaijin have died here.” That was true; the three ambassadors she had encountered on Kefallinia were still there, still functioning decades later. “Perhaps they can’t die.”

“But if they do, then their atoms, not of the Earth, will be absorbed by the Earth’s rocks.”

“Perhaps that is a fair trade,” she said. “We should extend your philosophy. The universe is the greater Earth; the universe births us, takes us back when we die. All of us: humans, Gaijin, everybody.”

“Yes. Besides, there are lessons to learn.”