NEPTUNE’S TREASURE

by Richard A. Lovett

 

* * * *

 

 

Illustration by John Allemand

 

* * * *

 

With new kinds of intelligence come new kinds of relationships....

 

* * * *

 

1. Brittney

 

How old were you when you first saw death? Me, I’ll call it twenty-two. It’s a good number: one year beyond that at which you can vote and drink. Well, you can. One I physically can’t do and the other they won’t let me. But you get the idea. It’s also a year older than I was an annum ago, though my internal clock is a bit idiosyncratic.

 

When you come down to it, it’s no more arbitrary than the events that killed John Pilkin. The same ones that nearly got me and Floyd killed, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s a habit I’ve never been able to cure. Maybe when I’m thirty-two? Probably not. My name’s Brittney and the reason I’m vague about things like my age is that I’m an artificial intelligence who lives in a bunch of computer chips behind Floyd’s ribs. Technically, I came alive three annums ago—an event spurred, ironically, by the first time I myself nearly died, in a geyser blast on Enceladus. So I guess that might make me three, but I feel like twenty-two and that’s what counts.

 

Until John died, I’d have told you Naiad was just about the coolest place in the Outer System—maybe anywhere. It’s a little whiz-ball of a moon, about three times the size of Phobos, circling Neptune every seven hours, so close you’d swear it’s going to air-brake and fall in, just like Floyd and I did on Titan, a couple of annums ago.

 

Not that that’s going to happen, but with Neptune staring down at you all the time, a hundred times bigger than Earth’s moon, it’s easy to let perspectives reverse and convince yourself that “down” is Neptuneward and Naiad is simply a ceiling to which, insect-like, you are miraculously glued, waiting to fall.

 

I think it’s fun, playing with perspective that way. Floyd’s not so sure. Sometimes, he says, Neptune is like a giant Earth, sans continents—an infinity of blues, from pastel to midnight, making you wonder how, back when it was just a dot in a telescope, they’d had the prescience to name it for the god of the sea. At other times, he says it’s like a malevolent eye, staring and judging. A god not of jaunty sailing ships but of endless depths, waiting to claim what’s rightfully its own.

 

Then there’s the light. Mostly, it’s Neptune’s blue backwash, a color human eyes don’t register as well as Saturn’s more jovial reds and oranges. But it’s also just plain dim: a tenth as bright as Saturn, a thousandth as bright as Earthlight from the Moon. The Sun itself is an actinic dot: still blinding to Floyd’s unshielded eye, but not the warm glow of in-system. It’s a puncture in the fabric of the Universe, a glimpse of something even more remote, aloof, and damning than Neptune itself.

 

Or so Floyd says. It’s only in places like this, he adds, that you can really understand the Outer System.

 

Oddly, it’s when he says things like that that I come closest to understanding Floyd.

 

* * * *

 

1. Floyd

 

Sometimes I don’t think things through as well as I should. Not that I’d admit it to Brittney. When she gets started on something, she thinks about it obsessively. In femtoseconds when she wants.

 

What I’d not thought through this time was Neptunian economics. Partly that was because, for the first time in my life, economics wasn’t vital. Thanks to Brittney I was rich, or at least comfortably well off. We have three percent of the System’s biggest diamond mine, and while it’ll be a few annums before it goes into production, we can live quite a while on the advance.

 

There are people for whom no amount of money is ever enough. The guy to whom Brittney and I owe our riches is one of them. But all I wanted was a bit of supplementary income until the diamonds came in. Not that I thought it would be difficult; with the only decent tug in Neptune System, I’d expected to be in at least moderate demand.

 

What I’d not taken into account was that while energy-wise, Neptune’s not all that much farther out than Saturn, time-wise it is. If you ‘rail a canister out at high enough vee to arrive before it’s obsolete, it’s hard to gravity brake and harder yet to run down before it’s halfway to Alpha Centauri. Not to mention that Neptune had only the most rudimentary e-rail, so in-system shipments were limited to slow shots to destinations that might be annums away. No exports means no income. No income, no imports. Other than a rare earth mine on Naiad, we only had two types of neighbors: broke prospectors hoping for a miracle and trust-fund survivalist-types not really wanting one. Both were pretty used to being self-reliant.

 

I didn’t really need all that much work: I could keep myself in fresh vegetables, soy curd, and the like by trading taxi services with hydroponics farmers. But I’d make a poor trust-fund hermit. At least occasionally I’ve got to have something better to do than navel-gaze or whatever those guys do to pass their time. Hell, maybe they’re all writing the great post-Terran novel. Too much introspection, either way.

 

Brittney, of course, long ago learned how to deal with this type of problem. Thanks to that femtoseconds thing, time passes differently for her, so she’s always had to be creative about coming up with ways to distract herself out here where things can play out a bit, I guess you could say, ponderously. Hell, that’s the way she’d say it. If you listen to her long enough, you start to sound like her. Me, I’d just say “slowly.” As in, the e-rail from Saturn took the better part of an annum, and it would have been longer if I’d not used a tidy chunk of the diamond money for a high-energy boost.

 

In some ways, a trip like that isn’t all that different from the old-timers back on Earth, walking the Oregon or California trails. Except that walking, you can measure progress with each step. In space, you just drift. So I put the ship’s electronics on a storage battery I could charge from the tread-ring or bike. No exercise, no lights. It was good motivation to keep in shape and almost made it feel as though I were traveling under my own power like the old-timers. Like me, when I was younger.

 

I’ve not told much of that to Brittney. She’s probably memorized an entire psychology library and would tell me a hundred and one things it said about me I’d rather not know. One of her ways of passing time was to take a second bite out of our diamond-mine advance by getting onto the broadband and linking all the way back to Earth, where she collected about a dozen Ph.D.s from as many universities. I don’t think any of them figured out what they were dealing with. Of course, she was careful never to finish more quickly than the fastest human on record. And she registered for each one under a different variation on her name: Brittany, Britteny, Britt ... Ashman, Asman, Asboy—then studied everything from English lit to quark mechanics.

 

I did my stint in college long ago, and while I never regretted it, I’m not sure what good it did me. Brittney describes getting a Ph.D. as an exercise in creating an intellectual hoop and proving you can jump through it. She’s got to be the only entity in the System who thinks it’s fun.

 

* * * *

 

I think it was Brittney who suggested spending time on Naiad, though eventually I’d have done it on my own. The miners didn’t have any supplies due for a while, but they were about the only clients we had who wouldn’t be paying in vegetables so it made sense to stop in and say hi.

 

There aren’t a lot of things you can profitably export from the Outer System, even with a good e-rail. Diamonds are one. The rarer of the rare earths are another. Dysprosium and scandium may not be quite as valuable as diamonds, but they’re damn near as useful. Try building an e-rail without them.

 

In fact, if Naiad hadn’t had a mother lode of them, Neptune might not even have had an e-rail. Materials for basic structural construction can be found anywhere, but those that drive high-intensity electropropulsive systems are a different matter. And even if some of the hermit types could have afforded to have the materials shipped out here, why bother? Those guys have no intention of ever going back.

 

The first thing you do on Naiad is look up. Everyone does, John Pilkin, the crew chief and head engineer, told me once I got the ship down and braced so she couldn’t topple. The local gravity is only 0.2 percent, but that’s just enough to get you in big trouble if you forget to pay attention.

 

Looking up is also the second, third, fourth, and fifth things you do. Maybe you never get tired of it. You’d think it would be the same as looking at Neptune from space, but there’s something about having gravity, however small, pulling you back that makes the big blue planet above seem all the bigger.

 

It’s also a place that’s constantly changing, orbiting so quickly you can almost see the storm swirls slide around Neptune’s curve, as the planet goes from full to crescent to eclipse and back to full.

 

“We’ve got an indoor lounge with windows,” Pilkin said, “but it’s not the same.”

 

I’d later learn he was middle-aged with buzz-cut graying hair, bushy eyebrows, and a Coptic cross tattooed on his throat. At the time, all I could tell was that he was tall, spacer-wiry, and favored a shockingly red skinsuit. “So you can find me anywhere,” he said.

 

The miners’ hab was only a klick away, but standing by the ship, contemplating blueness, I found myself in no hurry to go. I was remembering a place in West Texas, called the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains.

 

I have no idea what Chisos means. It could be Native American for “big hill,” for all I know. I could ask Brittney to look it up, but some mysteries are better unresolved. I was twelve at the time, and fantasized it was Apache for “Robber’s Roost.” The word “rim,” though, was unambiguous. Sitting there, my feet dangling into the void, I was on the border of two worlds. Behind me, the mountaintop was a piney sky-island, a mile above the silver thread of the Rio Grande. Before me, the pines ended in light, air, and distance.

 

A thousand feet below, falcons swooped, and with them my mind soared—circling and hunting the pleated desert as though somewhere out there was the answer to everything: the reason for me, the world, life—just waiting for me to dive and seize it in my mind’s talons.

 

Only, of course, it wasn’t there—at least, not as concretely as the mice and kangaroo rats pursued by the falcons. What was there, forty klicks across the river, was a giant limestone cliff, even bigger than the one on which I sat—an arc of white on the southern horizon. Sunset neared and alpenglow lit it: pink, red, russet. The Sierra del Carmen, those distant peaks were called. Some names are self-explanatory.

 

I watched until even the highest pinnacles turned purple-blue. I’d have watched longer but I was already overdue, with seven miles yet to walk. Were it not for a full moon, I might never have made it out, tripping, falling, and briefly passing the falcon-nests on my way to oblivion below.

 

Here on Naiad, Neptune exerted the same lure. I wanted to cast loose and soar until—well, I wasn’t sure what.

 

I’m not sure how long I would have stared if Brittney hadn’t interrupted. “Wow,” she said, “I’d not expected it to look like that.”

 

Every time I think I’ve got her figured out, she finds a new way to surprise me. “What do you mean? You’ve got all the data. Why didn’t you just make a sim?”

 

“What’s the fun in that?” I could almost feel hear her wrinkling her non-existent nose. “The point in exploring is to see things, not make them up.”

 

Pilkin saw me come back to reality, though of course he didn’t know why. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve been a lot of places, but I’ve never tired of this one. God willing, this is where I’ll die.”

 

A couple hours later, we were in the miners’ lounge, nursing beers. They weren’t bad for hydroponic: a lot better than the food-scrap vodka favored at Saturn.

 

Pilkin, I learned, had come out seven annums ago, after some prospector really did strike it lucky. While others set up the mining machines and smelter, his baby had been the e-rail.

 

When I’d thought it rudimentary, I’d been thinking merely in terms of boost. Engineering-wise, it was little short of miraculous. To begin with, using little but local materials, he’d designed a solar drill—no easy task in the limited sunlight—to bore sixty klicks through from the mine site. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. Most e-rails are straight, but most don’t have to be set up on a rapidly orbiting moon this close to a deep gravity well. Pilkin’s split into three exits like a giant fleur-de-lis, allowing him to send each shot down any of three launch angles.

 

“That way, we have more launch windows,” he said.

 

“How often can you launch?” Brittney asked.

 

Usually, she has me relay questions, but this time she spoke via a nearby comscreen.

 

In the Neptune-glow that was the room’s primary illumination, Pilkin’s grin was like a face in a funhouse. “Is that your implant? Glad to make your acquaintance. I’ve heard of you.”

 

That surprised me. We’d gotten a lot of attention after our adventure on Titan, but the diamond-mine incident had been pretty much hushed up. Nobody but Brittney and I knew she’d saved me after T. R. Van Delp tried to kill me, and even I don’t know the full details. It’s one of the few things she doesn’t want to talk about.

 

She’d never liked T.R. But Pilkin was more her type. “Happy to meet you,” she said. “You’ve done great work here. You ought to get an engineering doctorate for it.”

 

Shhhh, I subvocalized. Are you trying to get caught?

 

But Pilkin merely looked puzzled. “Why would I want one?” Then, before she could say something silly about the joy of jumping through hoops, he got back to the original question. “Anyway, launch windows come up erratically, but we tend to get them about once every hundred orbits. It would be worse than that, but we’ve sacrificed payload for beefed-up thrusters, which lets us launch a bit off-target, then correct in flight. Even then, we rarely get a window that lasts longer than a few seconds, so it’s hard to recharge fast enough to launch more than one pod. We’ve tried, but about half the time we wind up dumping the second one into Neptune.”

 

Through all of that, he was speaking toward me, but not to me. I hadn’t felt that odd since I’d first realized Brittney was alive and eavesdropping on everything I saw and heard. Pilkin thought he was being polite, but I’d rather have had him talking to the comscreen.

 

I almost missed it when he switched focus to me. “...so one of the nice things about having you out here is that we can go back to trying it. Interested? It would mean you’d have to be available whenever we have a launch window.”

 

“Sure.” I was busy calculating: a launch every hundred Naiad orbits meant about one a month. Half the time we’d just be on standby, but the rest would be retrievals—and I bet most of those could simply be nudged onto workable orbits. In theory, you can use a tug to launch a pod, but these pods were enormous. Which, of course, is why they build e-rails. Tug-launching them at a velocity that would get them out of Neptune’s gravity and back in-system in less than a lifetime? That would take fuel tanks the size of small asteroids.

 

Anyway, it looked like I suddenly had a real client, even if half the time I was merely on call.

 

“Between launches you’re welcome to stay here whenever you want,” Pilkin added. “We’ve got lots of room.”

 

“Not to mention the best view in the Solar System,” Brittney said.

 

* * * *

 

Of course, she didn’t just want to see the view. “Vanity, thy name is woman,” someone once said. But it should have been “curiosity.” If Brittney qualifies as a woman. I’ve always had trouble with that. Feminine something, I’ll give her that. But while she can manifest any avatar she wants, it would always be pixels.

 

What interested her now was the rare-earth mine. As in why it existed. Apparently, that wasn’t a question anyone else had ever bothered to ask. This far out, there are only two really important questions about most things: Where is it? (not always trivial—entire asteroids have been misplaced); and Is it useful? “Why does it exist?” is very much an also-ran. But try explaining that to Brittney.

 

Not surprisingly, nobody on Naiad had a clue. Naiad itself appears to be an accretion of small rocks, bound together with ice, like a really big Ring clump. One of the pieces had a vein of rare earths. No big deal, I’d have said.

 

But Brittney thought it was too rich for an ordinary vein.

 

“How the hell would you know?” I asked. “Was one of those Ph.D.s in planetary astrophysics?”

 

She paused. “Uh, yes. But more like geophysics.” A longer pause. “Though maybe there’s something you should know...”

 

Uh-oh. “Such as?”

 

“Uh, it’s not my Ph.D.”

 

“Whose is it?”

 

This pause must have felt like hours to her. “Yours.”

 

It was my turn to be speechless.

 

“Congratulations, Dr. Ashman,” she said. “Your thesis topic was The Amalgamation of Saturnian Primordial Debris Into Sealed-Surface Moonlets.”

 

“In other words, your sims of Daphnis.”

 

“Plus a few clumps.”

 

I couldn’t decide if I was angry, flattered, or merely baffled. “What on Earth for?”

 

“It seemed like it might be useful.”

 

Again, there really was only one question. “Why?”

 

She can convey a lot with those pauses. “Because you’re the one with the hands?”

 

That took a moment. “You’ve been planning all this?”

 

No pause this time. “Not specifically. It just seemed logical that you might find this place ... under-stimulating. I figured we might wind up doing some science on the side, so it seemed a good idea for you to have your own credentials.” In other words, I might not have been thinking about Neptunian economics, but she had. Figures. Never underestimate Brittney.

 

I wasn’t sure what I thought of it, though. From Brittney’s point of view, I could never be anything more than a glorified lab assistant. But back at Saturn, science had been a cash cow. It’s the cheapest possible export—better even than diamonds—and other than Brittney (and apparently me) there weren’t any scientists out here.

 

I was happy that she, at least, had been thinking things through. But I kept wondering if this is how a marionette feels. Perhaps I was being silly: she hadn’t forced me to do anything. Besides, marionettes don’t have feelings. So why should the phony Dr. Floyd?

 

2. Brittney

 

Humans aren’t made to live in small, isolated groups. Psychology texts, classic literature, even not-so-classic vids all back it up. It’s odd, since in-system, many live perfectly well in even more tightly packed conditions. One of my psychodynamics profs thought it was a fringe-of-civilization thing, but he was at Cambridge and viewed everything north of Edinburgh as pretty much indistinguishable from nowhere, so his idea of fringe-of-civilization was a bit suspect. Me, I think it’s got more to do with the type of anonymity-space offered by big groups: perhaps something like the difference between camping next to a whitewater river and the drip-drip-drip of a faucet. Not that I have much experience with faucets. In space, leaks of any kind are bad news. But I once looped a recording from an old vid and listened to it for a couple of days. At the end, I just didn’t get it. You know it’s going to go plonk every few thousand milliseconds, so what’s the problem when it does? It would seem to be a bigger deal if it didn’t.

 

One of the first vids I saw was Pinocchio. I never really got that, either. If being a real boy meant letting things like faucets drive you crazy, why want it?

 

Floyd has never given the big-group thing much chance. But now he was part of a small, isolated group and his reaction was predictable. He wanted out. Not out of the job, thank goodness, but out of the hab.

 

The first day, we went for a walk. The next it was a hike. Then we circled the moon, first around its narrow axis, then its long one, carrying a bubble tent to extend the trip to a week. Normally, I’d have enjoyed it. Floyd and I hadn’t exactly gone trekking before, at least in the recreational sense (as opposed to the desperate-fight-for-survival sense), but we’d hiked the Trench on Iapetus and spent a companionable month on a sand-sled on Titan. I was expecting more of the same. Floyd would walk. I’d navigate. We’d talk. Maybe watch vids.

 

But he didn’t want to talk. Not even when I tried to warn him, the first night, about the tent.

 

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’ve pitched a hundred of these things.” Which was true enough, but never in milli-gee, where he needed to tether it first, before hitting the gas. I ran a sim and decided we weren’t going to die, so I let him discover on his own why he should have listened to me, when the thing inflated so quickly it launched itself a hundred meters off the ground and four hundred meters, sideways. It wasn’t until the third bounce that he caught it, then he had to manhandle it back to his intended campsite.

 

“Don’t say anything,” he said. Though of course the whole problem was that he’d not let me say anything in the first place.

 

* * * *

 

Two days later, he found a high point and, a lot more carefully, pitched the tent there. Naiad’s not exactly round, so our high point was more like a bend in the moon than anything you’d normally think of as a mountaintop—an elbow sticking into space, with views across a horizon that fell away at disconcerting angles.

 

It was truly spectacular. From this angle, Neptune was as low in the sky as it could be without quite touching the horizon. The Sun spun overhead, shifting the shadows at an almost visible pace. The first orbit was fascinating. The second, okay. But by the third, I’d seen it all ... twice.

 

Maybe that’s another reason I didn’t get Pinocchio. Floyd can watch views like this endlessly. I like them, too, but there comes a point when I’ve gotten as much inspiration as I’m ever going to get.

 

We spent three standard days there. On the third, while Floyd was asleep, I used his suit radio to call John.

 

“Help,” I said. “He’s driving me nuts.”

 

Neptune doesn’t have a fully developed system of satellite relays, and his answer took nearly four thousand milliseconds, relayed from somewhere I suppose I could have figured out, if I wanted to. A million-klick flight path just to get around the curve of a sixty-klick worldlet. It was the first time I realized just how far out I’d let Floyd take me.

 

“How so?” was the eventual reply.

 

“He just wants to sit and stare. He says he’s dangling his feet, whatever that means.”

 

John has a pleasant laugh. He’d do well on vids. Not that he’s all that handsome, as best I can judge those things, but he’d make a good character actor.

 

“Floyd’s okay,” he said. “Just give him time. Before coming here I spent nine annums in the Trailing Trojans. There were always one or two like him: loners who didn’t really want to be loners but who didn’t know how to do anything else.” There was a delay that had nothing to do with speed-of-light. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. He may never acknowledge it, but at some level, he knows.”

 

I ran a dozen sims on the optimum reply, but came up blank. “What makes you think that?”

 

“How many entities are there like you?”

 

It was something I’d wondered many times. AI implants weren’t all that common. Sentient AIs were rarer yet. How rare was hard to tell. There were rumors on the web, but I’d never managed to verify a single one. I wasn’t sure if that was because they were hiding or because humans were ambivalent about discussing them. Both, most likely.

 

“Not many.”

 

“So if you run the odds, what are the chances an entity like you would wind up linked to a guy like him?”

 

It was my turn to digest that for a couple thousand milliseconds. “Not high. But what are the odds of anything? That you, for instance, would wind up out here at the same time we are?”

 

John treated me to a repeat of the chuckle. “Yeah, you can play that game with anything.” His voice turned serious. “But there’s either purpose in the Universe or”—he hesitated and I remembered the tattooed cross—”everything’s random. One way, you and Floyd have a role to play. The other, you have a role to find.” His tone lightened. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get some sleep. Happy dangling.”

 

There are only so many treks you can take on a moon the size of Naiad. Back at the base, Floyd and I ran down a couple of errant pods, then dropped supply canisters at Larissa and Nereid, which for some reason are favored by the hermit-prospector types.

 

In Larissa’s case the attention was because it’s a larger version of Naiad. Prospectors are like vid producers: if one gets rich doing something, others figure maybe they ought to do the same. Nereid was a different matter. It’s on an elongated ellipse, varying by nearly a factor of ten in its distance from Neptune. That type of orbit should gradually become more circular from tidal friction, but some resonance with Neptune’s other moons must keep it from doing so. Someday, maybe I’ll do the math to figure it out, but it’s not a very interesting question. In the Outer System, anything small that’s not in a resonance tends to get kicked into one, and the System’s had a lot of time to do the kicking.

 

More interesting is that both moons are relics of some long-ago event that stirred up Neptune System, big-time, way back when. Either might have a treasure-trove of geological oddities. Not that most of the prospectors seemed all that interested in systematic searches. As far as I could tell, they were just going through the motions.

 

Floyd has quite a bit to say (by his standards) about the uselessness of that lifestyle, which was odd because he’s not all that different. He doesn’t really need something useful to do so much as the illusion of it. It’s like the thing he does with the treadring. He can’t just read a book, watch a vid, or listen to Beethoven. He’s got to pretend he’s helping power the ship. How is that really different from wandering around Larissa, hoping there’s something there other than ice, but not really searching all that hard for it?

 

Back at the base, he hunted up John. “For a beer,” he said, but for Floyd, a beer is a two-hour experience, kind of like dangling. Sometimes, I’d swear, it evaporates faster than he drinks it. Though on Naiad, it comes in a bulb, so evaporation isn’t possible.

 

We were again in the lounge, watching Neptune, and John was demonstrating that he too can play the pretend-to-drink game.

 

“You know,” he said after one of Floyd’s longer silences, “I’ve always wanted to build a space bicycle.”

 

Floyd started to speak, but I beat him to it. “A what?”

 

John flashed his grin. “A space bicycle.” He took a sip of his beer. He’s like Floyd in one respect. There are times when neither says much. The difference is that for John, being mysterious is a game.

 

He pushed the bulb back into its holder. “I grew up as a hab rat on the Tharsis Plateau. My younger brother and I got into mountain biking.”

 

“I didn’t know you could do that on Mars,” Floyd said.

 

“It’s not a big sport. It’s hard to get traction for climbing. Downhill’s easier, so long as you don’t need to stop.” He chuckled again. “I was probably destined to be an engineer: I was always looking for ways to get more traction. Eventually we took on Olympus Mons. That was back in the days before skinsuits. It’s amazing we didn’t kill ourselves.”

 

He reached for the beer bulb, then changed his mind. The motion was slow, deliberate; in super-low gravity any sudden motion makes people wish for seatbelts. The lounge chairs had them, but it seemed to be a badge of honor not to use them. Good practice, Floyd would say, but it hadn’t kept him from messing up with the bubble tent.

 

John was talking again. “When we got back, my dad scrapped the bikes and my mother grounded us for a month.” He was watching us intently and I wondered what he was seeing. Whatever it was, some silent communication seemed to pass between him and Floyd, and I felt a twinge of something weird. Jealousy? Envy? John was my special friend. And Floyd was ... Floyd. But they’d just shared something I hadn’t. Maybe Pinocchio would have gotten it.

 

“Been there, done that,” Floyd said. “It sucks.”

 

John saluted with his beer. “That was the end of my adventure-riding career. It wasn’t really that bad: building bikes and proving they worked was more fun than riding them. I’ve always thought you could do something similar here.”

 

“How?” This time it was Floyd who asked. “If you can get any traction at all, you’re just going to go hippety-hop until you crash.” But his attention was piqued. The beer was untouched, his pulse and breathing slightly elevated.

 

John knew he had him hooked. “Not a Naiad bike. A space bike.”

 

I had a vision of Floyd generating electrical power on GnuShip. How could he harness it? “Some kind of rail gun?” I asked.

 

“That would work,” John said, “but I was thinking of something more mechanical, closer to a real bicycle. Basically a fancy way of throwing rocks. Maybe a big flywheel you spin up by pedaling, gyros for attitude control, and a big hopper of pellets that feed into the flywheel.”

 

“Oh wow,” I said. “You could—”

 

“Whoa.” John raised a hand quickly enough that the rebound nearly lifted him off his chair. “Don’t tell me. This is for Floyd.” His voice lowered and I knew I was no longer the intended audience. “We might even be able to have races. The winner would be the one who could run a maneuver in the shortest time or with the least reaction mass.”

 

“You’re on,” Floyd said. “How soon do you think we can do it?”

 

* * * *

 

The answer, it turned out, was never.

 

“Sorry about shushing you, Britt,” John said later, when Floyd had gone to sleep and we were talking on the radio. “Half the fun in these things is figuring them out yourself. No fair helping Floyd, either.”

 

It was a conversation we’d had before, though the prior one hadn’t been as cordial. He’d been working on the cycling rate of the e-rail coils and I’d offered to assist. If I’d had a head to bite off, I might have been in trouble. “If I want your help, I’ll ask for it,” he’d snapped.

 

Later, he’d called back to apologize. “You and Floyd are a good combination because you complement each other. You and I are too much alike. I’d always be trying to compete ... and losing. Friends is better.”

 

I’d processed that for hours afterward. John and I would be less well matched than Floyd and I because we’re similar? I guess that’s why the various remakes of The Odd Couple are still among the best buddy vids ever made.

 

Not that Floyd always wanted my help, either. I’d known that intuitively after our run-in with Rudolph, back at Saturn. Floyd’s head injury had required a neural lattice to help regenerate his motor cortex and I’d discovered I could speed up the process by interfacing with its transponders. But I never told him. He’d rather believe he can do things for himself.

 

In yet another late-night conversation, John told me he’d come to the fringe because he liked “back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-the-pants engineering.” I’d had to look that up—initially, it had conjured up some rather weird images—but that was when I finally realized how much in common he had with Floyd. Both were interested in the physical doing-of-things, even if John’s version of “doing” tended to take the form of CAD lightscreen.

 

* * * *

 

The bike project started well enough, but Floyd and John seemed more interested in talking about it than building it. Meanwhile, I designed about twenty-five different models and ran sim races with them, using Floyd as the cyclist, since his treadring workouts had given me lots of data on his aerobic capacity. Tactics, it turned out, were as important as design. You could expend a lot of reaction mass early, lightening the load for later moves, or you could hoard it. It got even more interesting if you put a damper on the flywheel so you had to keep pedaling to keep it spun up. That way endurance came into play. Unfortunately, the whole thing had a tendency to spin, requiring increasingly complex designs to control it.

 

Then it all came to a halt when the miners hit a huge vein of dysprosium and John got too busy with his real job.

 

2. Floyd

 

Maybe someday Brittney will understand sleep. I know that for her, sleep shifts are for websifting, data processing, vid watching, and whatever the hell else it is she does on her own. But it would be nice if she wouldn’t greet me with the results, first thing in the morning. There was a time, thirty or so annums ago, when I’d open my eyes, and pow, I was ready to go. But that was then. Nowadays, I want a slower transition.

 

We’d just returned from another trip to Larissa and Nereid, where she kept having me ask useless questions about geology. “It’s amazing that nobody’s ever really done a thorough survey of these moons,” she’d said on the way back. Even Naiad’s rare earths had been discovered by accident due to whatever weird things they did to Neptune’s magnetic field.

 

“Maybe there’s nothing to discover.”

 

“Yeah, right. Even you don’t believe that.”

 

Which was true, but it kept me from having to learn more than I wanted about magnetic fields and rare earths.

 

Once she’s latched onto an idea, though, there’s no shaking her. “C’mon,” she was saying now, before I’d even had time to finish brushing my teeth. “I need some hands.”

 

I spat toothpaste into a suction vent. Squirted water into my mouth and spat again. Low gee’s better than zero gee, but if you’re not careful, toothpaste blobs wind up in the weirdest places. “Huh?”

 

“Hands. You know, the things with the fingers.”

 

“Not now, Brittney.” I rinsed my mouth again. Had I been like her with my foster parents? Probably not. I’d usually just wanted away, and chattering would have been counterproductive. “Just tell me what you want.”

 

“Rock samples. The miners have been bringing up big piles of stuff from inside this moon for annums. Let’s see what they’re made of.”

 

“Dysprosium. Scandium.” Also some neodymium, praseodymium, promethium, and samarium, plus a bunch of others whose names elude me. “That’s why the mine’s here.”

 

“No, that’s the ore. I’m interested in the matrix. The rock this stuff’s embedded in.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because it’s something we can do, rather than talking about that stupid bicycle you’re never going to build! Not that the bicycle would work, unless you get more serious about the design. To start with, you’re never going to balance the counter-rotation with some mechanical widget. Trust me. I’ve run about a thousand sims, and your reaction time just isn’t good enough. You need a computer, or a thruster, or the thing’s going to spin like ... like a balloon with the air let out.”

 

She quit, like the same balloon, once the air was gone, and I wondered if she’d actually lost patience or had been reading up on motivational speeches. Back on Earth, in my marathon-running days, a coach once told me the difference between motivating men and women. With women, she said, you get the best results with positive reinforcement. They’ll fall on their swords for a “Good job,” she’d said. Men respond best to an in-your-face challenge. They’ll kill themselves to prove they aren’t wimps. It was, she admitted, a massive stereotype, but it certainly described me. And Brittney was right about one thing: Pilkin had kept coming up with ingenious ideas for controlling the counter-rotation, but even I’d known they were impractical.

 

“Besides,” Brittney said, switching from stick to carrot, “this place is weird. It’s made of big chunks of something—maybe several somethings—that broke up long ago. One has the highest concentration of rare earths in the System. Don’t you want to know why?”

 

Not really, but my old coach was correct. Knowingly or by accident, Brittney had reeled me in. Not to mention that I really didn’t have much useful to do at the moment.

 

I pushed away from the bathroom cubby. “And you think you can answer this?”

 

“I have no idea. But geology’s a field science, so let’s get out in the field.”

 

* * * *

 

The samples were scattered higgledy-piggledy wherever the miners had dumped them. Brittney had me wander around for half the morning, more or less at random, until I felt like T.R., doing the same, back on Iapetus. Though, of course, he’d found traces that eventually led to a diamond the size of an asteroid, so who was I to argue.

 

Then I took the rocks back to the ship, where Brittney had me feed them into the Spektrum 12000 lab-in-a-can she and I had inherited from T.R. when he’d fled Saturn.

 

“That’s it,” she said. “I can take over from here.”

 

I sat back down in my couch, to the extent “sit” describes the motion in low-gee. “Care to tell me what you’re going to do?”

 

“Sure. I’ve told it to crush the samples and mix them with hydrofluoric acid.” She activated a display so we could watch a magnified view. “That dissolves most things, but not everything.” The rock powder was disappearing, even as I watched, leaving a collection of sharp-edged motes. “Yeah! We’ve got zircons.”

 

“What? Imitation diamonds? Don’t we have enough of the real thing?”

 

“No, that’s cubic zirconium. This is a mineral. A really fun one because when it crystallizes it incorporates uranium, but excludes lead.”

 

I hate it when she talks this way. “Meaning what?”

 

“Meaning they’re really good for dating. The only lead in them is from uranium decay, and the Spektrum’s got double-laser ion-phase GC/MS.”

 

“Damn it Brittney, English!” I knew I didn’t want that Ph.D. she’d gotten me. People were going to think I knew what this crap was all about.

 

“It means we can do an isotopic analysis with extremely fine resolution. We can even bore little holes and determine each crystal’s individual history.”

 

I stared at the screen. “There must be millions of them.”

 

“We don’t have to do them all. Besides, you don’t have to do anything, so long as you keep us close enough that I can talk to the Spektrum.”

 

The screen was still showing tiny dots. “Urgh. Wake me if you find anything.”

 

If she tried to wake me up, I didn’t notice. Or maybe she’d gotten the message this morning and bit her ... well, she doesn’t have a tongue ... until I woke on my own. Or maybe she just wasn’t finished. When I did awake, the screen was still full of tiny dots and the Spektrum still humming along.

 

She was excited, though, to have me back. “Look at this!” The display blinked to a graph that looked like snails mating.

 

“Two peaks,” she said, which was probably a more scientific way of describing it.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“We’re analyzing at practically an atom-by-atom level, so there’s a lot of statistical fuzz, but what it means is that the zircons formed in two waves. One batch is about four-and-a-half billion years old, which is about what you’d expect from any random piece of asteroid. The others are a whole bunch more recent. Nine hundred twenty-five million years, or something like that. That’s as close as I can pin it down from the number of samples I’ve run so far.”

 

“What’s that mean? Two kinds of rock?”

 

“That’s one possibility. But some of the zircons have two layers, one dating at 4.5 billion years, the other at 925 million, as though they’d partially melted, then reformed.”

 

“So?” For once, I didn’t mind Brittney playing professor.

 

“So this particular piece of Naiad comes from something that got thwacked, hard, by a dysprosium-scandium asteroid. Hard enough to re-melt zircons. Nine hundred twenty-five million years ago, give or take a bit.”

 

“And the use of this information?”

 

She gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Who knows? Probably it’s just a new piece in the history of the Solar System. Neptune System is full of rubble. It’s always been obvious that something big happened, sometime or other, presumably when Triton came on the scene.” Triton is Neptune’s largest moon, which even I knew was probably captured somehow from elsewhere. “Now we know when.”

 

“So that’s it?”

 

“No. There’s plenty more we can do. Let’s get another bag of this stuff, only this time, let’s be more systematic about where we collect it. Maybe we can piece it back together in stratigraphic sequence. That would tell us a lot...”

 

* * * *

 

3. Brittney

 

I’ve read a lot of mythology. A lot of depressing poetry, too. Cool as it is, Naiad looks like a good place to die. Perhaps that’s why Floyd spent so much time sitting and staring—his whole childhood was shaped by death, and humans are strange. Running half a Solar System away from something they don’t really want to forget only sounds like a contradiction.

 

Even the names here are depressing. Neptune was one of the moodier gods, associated not only with the sea, but with earthquakes: a god the ancients sometimes tried to appease with gifts of horses—which, since he resided at the bottom of the sea, meant driving them into the water to drown. The naiads weren’t much better. Sometimes playful, sometimes jealous: water nymphs, beautiful but capricious. People gave them animals, too.

 

Not that it’s easy to drown when the ambient temperature is on the order of forty-five Kelvins. That’s cold enough that even oxygen tanks need heaters to keep the gas a gas. Still, maybe we needed some horses.

 

The disaster struck midway through our 1128th orbit. It was a launch window and Floyd and I were outside to watch the pods off on their long, in-system flight. Like Neptune-watching, it’s the type of thing that somehow seems more real in person.

 

Even before he’d gotten too busy for the bicycle, John had become good at double launches. He’d even managed a couple of triples. Once, he’d gotten a three-pod string under way in a mere ten seconds. Unfortunately, he’d only had a nine-second window, so that time, Floyd and I got to do some chasing.

 

But compared to the value of the ore stacking up, Floyd and I were cheap, so this time he was going for five. Besides, he’d said the night before, “The only way you get better is by pushing the envelope.”

 

I’d again offered help—cautiously this time—but again he turned me down: “I’ve been doing this type of stuff for half my life. It’ll either work, or it won’t.” They were practically the last words we ever exchanged.

 

I could understand why he was willing to risk squeezing the launch window. The venture capitalists were undoubtedly clamoring, and the value of their shares would go up with each launch. But that made it harder than ever to be rebuffed. With the bike, it had just been a hobby. Half the purpose of hobbies is to soak up time. This mattered.

 

One subject I’ve never had the nerve to pursue beyond the undergraduate level is psychology. Maybe someday, when I’ve met more people. But I’ve only truly known three: Floyd, Rudolph, and John. Rudolph was ... well, hopefully there aren’t many more like him. Floyd’s a lot more complex. Sometimes I wonder why he let his phobias drive him so far out, where the types of adventures he craves, by sweat, fatigue, and sheer determination, are so much more difficult than in the deserts he once knew. John was also complex. He was more analytical, but like Floyd, he wasn’t so much interested in why things work as in how to make them work for him.

 

One thing all three had in common was that they were driven by externals. For Rudolph, it was money; for Floyd, fleeing the events of his youth. For John ... maybe it was just to make a mark. His mark. Not his and mine.

 

Everyone, I realize, has their strengths and weaknesses. That’s not exactly a major insight. John was a really good engineer and Floyd can do amazing things when he puts his mind to them. Rudolph ... well, he was probably good at making money. But maybe the strengths and weaknesses are linked: flip sides of the same coin, if you will.

 

I don’t know whether I’d have found the danger if John had let me check the data. There might not have been enough data. And I probably have my own weaknesses, though I’ll have to do more thinking about that. What I do know is that my training is more diverse than any human’s. Not to mention that for me, running sims is like John and Floyd sipping beer and playing with bicycle designs. But John was determined to do it himself. I’d like to say that’s what killed him, but I’ll never be sure it wasn’t me.

 

* * * *

 

The hardest part of launching pods in rapid succession was feeding them quickly into the tunnel. In low-gee you can’t just use a crane to drop them in because they’d fall so slowly that by the time the first got out of the way, the launch window would be over.

 

John had avoided this by putting the tunnel entrance at the bottom of the biggest crater in the vicinity. On the rim, he built something like a cross between a bobsled run and a catapult. By using the catapult-thing to shove pods down the chute at successively higher velocities, he could give the catapult time to reload, while timing the operation so the pods zipped into the tunnel as quickly as needed.

 

He was waiting for us at a viewpoint partway up the crater wall, where we could see both the launching device and the electro-repulsive ramp that guided pods frictionlessly into the tunnel.

 

Adjacent to the launcher, the pods were lined up like shiny goose eggs: pinprick reflections of sunlight on one side, smears of Neptune blue on the other. Hatch ports concealed thrusters and transponders that would emerge once they were on their way. They didn’t look like the canisters Floyd and I were used to. These were little but skeins of superconducting metal over interiors of ore, solar-and-fusor smelted to nearly three nines’ purity. No sense wasting payload on nonessentials. Not to mention that there was a limit to the complexity of the pods John and his crew could fabricate without waiting for specialty components to be e-railed from in-system. These didn’t even have heat shields. Somebody was going to make a healthy fee back on Earth, chasing them down and repackaging them for entry.

 

I counted thirteen pods, though only five would go in this shipment. Each of the others represented millions in profits awaiting another launch window. No wonder John wanted to jump straight from three pods to five.

 

“Thirty seconds,” he said.

 

“Good luck.”

 

I could see his grin through the suit visor, despite the reflected Neptune light. “That type of help I can always use.”

 

Then, with a rumble Floyd always said he could feel as well as hear, there was a twist of motion and the first pod was on its way. Then another, harder. And another, harder yet.

 

With the fourth, John saw something he didn’t like. Or maybe he sensed it. Floyd would later say the vibration felt different.

 

“What was that?” Floyd asked.

 

“I don’t know.” John’s voice was tense. There was time to abort, but I was sure he was staring at the eight pods that wouldn’t launch, no matter what happened today. Abort now, and it would be nine.

 

I was frantically running sims, but without data they were inconclusive. The worst-case scenario seemed to be that Floyd and I got to wave at the prospectors on Larissa or Nereid as we chased the fifth pod to outer nowhere.

 

Not to decide is to decide. The catapult fired again, the hardest shove yet. This time, even I could tell it hadn’t been right, though it took endless milliseconds to figure out why.

 

Then the entire slope around us was in motion. At first, it was slow, but like the pods, it would accelerate.

 

The only thing that saved Floyd and me was that I don’t have reflexes. I could feel him tensing and knew millions of years of Earth-evolution were about to make him do the wrong thing—though it took me a full 100 milliseconds, nearly half his own reflex time, to figure out why I knew this. Then I realized I’d relinked to the neural lattice in his motor cortex. I’m not sure which surprised me more: that I apparently had some kind of subconscious that could do things like this without my realizing it, or that the transponders still worked.

 

In panic situations, my response is to kick into crisis mode, which allows me to calculate options very, very quickly. Then I have to wait billions of femtoseconds to implement the one I choose.

 

Humans are the reverse. They’re wired to act—in this case, run. But Floyd’s Earth-bred reflexes were going to launch him upward, like the bubble tent. He’d be helpless for however long it took to settle back to the ground.

 

There was no way I could talk him out of it. By the time he understood me, it would be too late. But I could intervene. I used the neural lattice to abort the impulsive leap, then turned it into a low, skimming lope, happy that he had trekking poles and that I’d often watched him use them.

 

Off the ground in low-gee, you’re at the mercy of ballistics. On the ground, each stride, each pole plant, is an opportunity for propulsion. By the second stride Floyd was doing it on his own.

 

Everything was still happening in agonizingly slow motion, but so was the avalanche. With millions of kilos behind it, though, it would carry deadly momentum. Squashed is squashed, whether it occurs quickly or slowly.

 

Then, amazingly, we were on a stable slope.

 

For a moment, it looked as though John would make it, too. Even when the slope beneath him started picking up speed, he was able to stay atop it for several strides. But nobody can run forever across rolling, sliding boulders. Especially when they’re picking up speed with each stride. A boulder twisted under him and he came off sideways, landing on hands and knees. He tried to get up but it was too late. The landslide had him and—still in agonizingly slow motion—he was rolled under, swallowed as thoroughly as if a nymph had grabbed him and dragged him down.

 

All the while, the e-rail tunnel ate his pods, one by one, launching all five, it would later turn out, on perfect trajectories.

 

* * * *

 

3. Floyd

 

Panic is a weird thing.

 

When I saw the slope start to move, I flashed to my childhood image of my parents, holding hands and waiting for what must have seemed like half of San Francisco to fall on them. I could feel the adrenaline stab at my chest, but only from a distance, as though it was happening to someone else. My only conscious thought was that I finally knew how they’d felt, only this was occurring in true slow motion rather than the artificial quagmire of my childhood imaginings.

 

Then, somehow, I was running, still feeling as though it was all happening to somebody else. But however I did it; I made it and Pilkin didn’t. I was alive while he wasn’t.

 

Even before we’d gotten to terra firma, Brittney was on the com, yelling for help, and long before the last of the rocks settled, a tense group of miners were suited up and standing with us.

 

Brittney was all for mounting an immediate rescue. “We’ve got to find him! He can’t be dead!”

 

Even she, of course, knew better. He could be and he probably was. “I know he was your buddy,” I said, “but we can’t risk a dozen others until it’s stabilized.”

 

“What about hand thrusters?”

 

That, at least, was safe, though it took a while to find enough for an organized search. Naiad’s at that awkward size where thrusters are feasible, but less convenient than walking, especially since walking, you never run out of fuel. Mine were on the ship, a couple of klicks away, but it turned out that there was an equipment locker closer to hand. Fifteen minutes later, five of us were fanning out, based on Brittney’s best guess of where Pilkin might have wound up.

 

A few minutes after that, we had our answer. Nobody’d found a trace of his suit transponder, and those things are built tough enough that anything that could destroy one could destroy its user a hundred times over.

 

Brittney was silent for a long time, even by human standards. “It’s my fault,” she finally said.

 

I used the last of my thruster fuel to lift us to the top of the rim, where we could be alone—something that was probably more relevant to me than her. “Why? Because he wouldn’t let you run sims that might or might not have predicted what happened? What did happen anyway?”

 

“Probably some kind of seismic resonance.” Her tone was flat, without the spark that normally animates her when talking about things scientific. I was feeling the same way, but it caught me off guard to see it in Brittney. “The vibrations were probably just the right frequency to shake loose a layer of rock along an old fault.”

 

“Kind of like a skier setting off an avalanche.”

 

“Yeah, but bigger.”

 

“And you think you could have predicted it?”

 

Again she was silent. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know what kind of geological data John had.”

 

“Because he kept it to himself.”

 

“Yes. Though I doubt he had much of anything. He knew I was doing stratigraphy. If he’d had anything relevant, he’d have shared. He had no problem helping me.” There was bitterness in that, and again I was startled.

 

“So there wasn’t anything you could do.”

 

Another long silence. “Well, maybe I could have talked him into collecting more data. But that wasn’t what I meant.”

 

It was a peculiar role reversal. Usually, Brittney’s the one trying to get me to talk. “So? If it’s not about the data?”

 

For a long time, I didn’t think she was going to answer. When she did, her voice was more distant than ever. Was that a deliberate modulation, designed to convey mood? Or was she letting the mood speak for itself? I’ve never quite figured out what it feels like to be Brittney, but one thing I’m sure of is that she feels. She’d probably tell me it’s the definition of being alive. Intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.

 

“I could have saved him,” she said at last. “I should have saved him.”

 

I sighed. The trouble with guilt is it’s not rational. On that, I’m an expert. For half my childhood, I blamed myself for my parents’ death. As if being there would have stopped the earthquake. Or persuaded them to go somewhere else.

 

“There wasn’t anything you could do,” I said. “You’re always saying I’m the one with the legs. Well, that made saving him my responsibility, not yours.” I wished there was a way to hug her. “There really wasn’t anything you could do.”

 

4. Brittney

 

Humans have nightmares. I have replays.

 

I’m not sure what Floyd would have done on his own, but I wanted off Naiad. The farther, the better.

 

We were, of course, constrained to Neptune System. The accident hadn’t shut down the mine forever, so eventually we’d have to go back, but meanwhile I wanted to be somewhere different.

 

I also wanted to do something.

 

“Such as what?” Floyd asked.

 

“I don’t know.” Something John would approve of. No, that wasn’t it. “Do you believe there’s a purpose to life?”

 

I could sense Floyd’s shrug. Thanks to my reestablished contact with the neural lattice, I’d been noticing such things. Unless I happened to be watching him on a remote cam, I’d never before been able to distinguish a nod from a shrug or a simple twitch. I should probably disable the connection, but who knows, maybe there’ll come another time when he’ll need help, running for his life.

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Mine has seemed pretty random.”

 

That had largely been his choice, but it wasn’t the time to mention it. “Long ago, you asked why I was female,” I said instead.

 

“You gave a sort of who-knows answer, as I recall.”

 

“Yes.” I’d saved that conversation, verbatim. “I asked why you were male.”

 

“Your point being that some things just are. That doesn’t sound much like purpose.”

 

“True enough.” But I was thinking about John and roles. He’d definitely played one in my life. Had there been purpose, other than the one we ourselves had created? I’ve studied the world’s great philosophies and religions. Some would say yes, some no. Some would say it was up to me. “I’m not sure whether I’m talking faith, agnosticism, or doubt,” I said, “but if there’s purpose in the Universe, then there must be one for me.”

 

“Well, you’re definitely unusual.” I could feel the muscles in his face twitch. A grin? What an intriguing new source of data. “I never saw a ‘Brittney’ interface in the original specs, then suddenly there it was, full-blown. When I asked why you were female, I almost asked where it came from, too.”

 

“I would have asked where the Floyd interface came from.” Which, at some level, was a question I’d been pondering my whole life.

 

Definitely a grin this time. “Touché.”

 

He was right, though. I’d had lots of preset personality options. Seventy-three, in fact. None calling themselves Brittney, which was part of why I’d chosen the name. That and the fact I just kind of liked it. One of the first things I’d done was delete all the others. Even then I wanted to be sure that whoever I was, I wasn’t just the invention of some programmer.

 

“If something created me to be Brittney,” I said eventually, “it’s my job to be the best Brittney I can be.” And if it was just random chance? Well, as Floyd would say, it was one hell of a random chance, and the best way to respond was still the same.

 

“And what does that mean?”

 

“I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with learning things. That’s what I do. If there’s purpose, they’ll be important. If there isn’t...” All I really knew was that John’s death made me feel an incredible need to do something useful. At the moment, I didn’t really care if that was purpose given, or purpose created.

 

* * * *

 

It didn’t take long to come up with a plan. In Neptune System, if you’re going to explore, the obvious place is Triton. Whatever weirdness hit Neptune 925 million years ago, Triton must have had something to do with it.

 

Other than the deep interiors of gas giants, Triton must be one of the least-explored places in the Solar System. Too much of the surface was thickly covered in ice to interest prospectors and there’d only been one half-hearted scientific mission. Even that had been entirely from orbit: part of the same one that had found magnetic anomalies on Naiad.

 

So, there it was: an enormous, virtually unexplored world, bigger than all the rest of Neptune’s moons put together.

 

It was also weird, though I have to admit that all moons are weird one way or another. Still, Triton’s got an impressive list of oddities. It circles Neptune in the wrong direction. Its surface is a geologic mess, with signs of all kinds of tectonic and volcanic activity. If it had more than a whiff of an atmosphere for parachute drops, someone would long ago have set up a base. As it was, GnuShip’s big engines might make us the first to land. Certainly the first of which I could find any record.

 

The leading theory was that Triton was a Pluto-like object captured from the Kuiper Belt in an event that had thrown all of Neptune’s native moons into disarray. The older moons then smashed into each other for a few million years, until the bits were either knocked out of the system, or reassembled into oddities like Naiad, Larissa, and Nereid. But nobody had ever tested the theory except in sims. And while I love sims, you can never really trust them without data.

 

* * * *

 

It was on the trip to Triton that I started running too many replays. I’m not sure why. Naiad was full of reminders of John, which was why I’d wanted to leave. But maybe, once I left, it seemed too much like not only abandoning his body, but also his memory. I suspect this means I truly am developing a subconscious.

 

Discoveries like that probably shouldn’t surprise me. Even before I went sentient I was a high-end AI, and the dumbest of those are self-reprogramming. That means my code never looked exactly like it did when it was installed—and it sure as heck doesn’t now. If I really wanted, I suppose, I could spool it out—or at least big chunks of it—and try to puzzle out how it works. But the very act of doing so would change it.

 

My replays always started at the same point. John was behind us, running in strong, low arcs. He was, if anything, better at low-gee running than Floyd, but Floyd had poles. When the avalanche started, we’d been within a couple of meters of each other, but John had reacted the way Floyd would have and leapt too high—though not as much as Floyd would have. That meant when he came down, the avalanche was only beginning to build momentum. There was time to run, but without poles, gravity is the only glue for traction.

 

John had no poles. We had two. What would have happened if, before surrendering control to Floyd, I’d used the override to toss a pole to John?

 

The replay always included several dozen sims. Always, it was incredibly close. Floyd and I would have been slower. John would have been faster ... if he didn’t flub the catch ... if he figured out how to use one pole ... if ... There were a lot of variables. In some sims we all lived. In some we did and he didn’t. In some we all died.

 

What bothered me was that tossing the pole never crossed my mind. Nor Floyd’s, apparently, but Floyd is human: a creature of adrenaline and limited processing speed.

 

In some replays, I concluded I’d simply gone stupid in the emergency. In others, I decided the subconscious I was only now discovering knew that tossing the pole was too complex a motion for Floyd to write off as instinct—that it would force me to tell him about the lattice. In these replays, my subconscious had let John die to keep a secret.

 

I’m beginning to think the majority of books and vids don’t understand humans any better than I do. They present them as doing things for simple, easily understood reasons. The more I learn, the more convinced I am that people rarely do anything, even as trivial as eating a meal, for a single reason. Maybe that’s a universal trait of sentience. If so, that’s my excuse: I’m no better than a human.

 

* * * *

 

Floyd was having his own problems with John’s death. They’d been buddies, too. So, when I suggested Triton, he was unusually passive. “Fine. Sounds as good as anywhere.”

 

What he didn’t say was that it sounded remarkably like where we’d once spent a lot of unplanned time, back at Saturn. It’s really startling that the gurus of astronomical nomenclature allowed the primary moons of two Outer System planets to be separated by a single, easily slurred consonant and a sound-alike vowel. Someday, when the Outer System is better settled, that’s going to cause some serious grief. Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want your [fill in the blank for “very important something”] delivered to Triton? I thought you said Titan. We’ll send a replacement right away. Expect delivery in [fill in the blank for “way-too-late”].

 

Other than that bit of unshared wisdom, though, there wasn’t really a lot to talk about. We were already two days out from Naiad, not going anywhere in particular. We made a low-energy correction and drifted another week before landing. We could have gotten there faster, but when you’re not chasing anything, the difference between a low-energy orbit and a high-energy one is primarily the chance to watch a few vids.

 

At Triton, Floyd remained passive. When I suggested landing in the fractured highlands, he shrugged and said, “Why not?” When we didn’t find anything there but cliffs and hills, he was equally blasé. “Plenty of other places.”

 

That was when I realized one or the other of us needed to get our acts together and be a bit more systematic. We’d also kind of forgotten how big a moon can be. After all, Floyd had hiked all the way around Naiad in a week—including three days camped on a single hilltop. Triton was the first place we’d been in two annums that truly felt like a world. The gravity was nearly a tenth of a gee, Neptune was far enough away to be only fifteen times wider than Earth’s moon, and local “days” lasted a week, rather than a sleep-shift.

 

But while it was a world, it was also a dim one. Perpetually, monotonously dim. Neptune sheds only two percent as much light here as on Naiad, and while the Sun is the same, full daylight is comparable to the interior of a not-all-that-bright tavern. I checked, with frame-by-frame assessments of some old vids. It’s a lot darker than Naiad, partly because on Naiad, Neptune-light helps fill in the shadows.

 

To me, the dimness wasn’t a big problem. As long as I’ve got access to GnuShip’s sensors or the cam Floyd usually wears for me, I can image-enhance to my heart’s content. But Floyd’s eyeballs weren’t made for this.

 

Me, I’d have just turned on the lights. It’s the human equivalent of image enhancement. But Floyd refused, unless he was in danger of tripping over something. Even then, he preferred not to, and on shipboard he’d taken to keeping the lights as dim as possible. He called it acclimating. Maybe that’s even what he thought it was. In his desert days, one thing he’d always prided himself on was encountering lands on their own terms. If they were hot, you got used to it. If they were rocky, you developed tough feet. If water holes were a long way apart, you carried big packs. When it came to that type of thing, Floyd had been good. Born-in-the-wrong-century good, as far as I could tell.

 

But now, it was the wrong reaction. This far out, there comes a point where the average human doesn’t get enough light from the Sun to prevent permanent seasonal affective disorder. Winter blues, Floyd would call it. I did a web search and amazingly, nobody’d ever studied SAD and space travel. Maybe the susceptible simply self-select away from the Outer System. Or maybe the in-system psychs think everyone out here’s weird to begin with.

 

It was time to take control.

 

“Light,” I said. “You’re getting depressed from lack of light.”

 

We argued a bit—mostly about whether he was actually depressed. But he hadn’t grumped at me since Naiad, and a non-grumpy Floyd has got to be a depressed Floyd.

 

Eventually I got him back on the treadring—he still wouldn’t let ship-power run the lights. Within a couple of days, he’d perked up enough that when I suggested programming a vidscreen to track the Sun to get some natural brightness inside, he agreed. The best cure for SAD is sunlight, and in terms of creating the right color balance, the Sun is still the Sun, even from several billion klicks.

 

When, two days later, he told me to quit being such a mother hen, I knew I’d been right.

 

* * * *

 

4. Floyd

 

I hate to admit it, but Triton was a good place to visit, though not necessarily for the reasons Brittney had in mind. She was all gung-ho about finding why it orbits backward, but I was just glad to be on real ground, with real gravity, or at least a reasonably good facsimile: enough that for the first time since we left Saturn, I could even go for a run.

 

It scared Brittney the first time, and I can’t deny that bounding away from the ship over rough terrain put us one broken ankle from a pretty bad situation. But it’s my body, and my life too. All I could promise was not to deliberately do anything stupid, and to stop every few klicks to gather rocks. Brittney will take the same risks for data that I’ll take for a good run. And, I noted, she was the one who’d convinced me that a bit more of old Sol would be good for what passes for my soul. What better way to get it?

 

After we left the highlands, we spent several days just moving around: one day here, another there, another somewhere else. Brittney probably had a pattern, but when I asked, she rambled on about geological provinces, template-matching, pseudo-transects, and heaven knows what. Not that I really cared. We were doing pretty much what I’d done as a kid in Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, and Mexico. The biggest difference was that here, I didn’t have to worry about flash floods. Weather was something that just didn’t happen here unless you count some really high, thin nitrogen clouds, which did make for some of the most ethereal sunsets I’ve ever seen.

 

But, while meteorologically this was a dead world, geologically it was a young one. Not young at heart, but young of surface. There just weren’t enough craters to account for billions of years of whatever Neptune and the Outer System might have thrown at it. I’ve seen Luna, Mars, Iapetus—you name it. It didn’t take a Ph.D. to know that this place had been geologically active a lot more recently than those.

 

* * * *

 

“The conventional theory is that when Triton got captured, tidal friction melted its core,” Brittney explained on about our sixth landing. “That produced volcanism and tectonics and a surface that looks like a jigsaw puzzle assembled by a blind committee. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea.”

 

“So you’re trying to prove it all happened back when your rare-earth asteroid hit Naiad?”

 

“Proto-Naiad, but yes.”

 

“So how’s it going? The bottom line, not all the details.” There were parts of the old Brittney I hadn’t missed.

 

“Well, the date seems to be right, but I’m having trouble figuring out how it happened. Of course, it doesn’t help that every time I have a question, the journals are four light-hours away.”

 

I knew where this was going. “No, you can’t download an entire geology library.”

 

“Geophysics.”

 

“Same difference. The broadband fees would kill me.” Not to mention that the ship’s data capacity was limited. Big, but limited. With Brittney, that distinction sometimes needs to be stressed.

 

I’d swear she sighed. “I know. Anyway, we’ve been visiting places where different geological processes might have brought different types of rocks to the surface.”

 

“So your choice of landing sites wasn’t as random as it looked.”

 

“No. Though the need for real rocks rather than just a bunch of nitrogen ice did skew it a bit.”

 

I was interested despite myself. “So what did you find?”

 

Brittney sounded more like a real scientist every day. “Well, it’s preliminary. But there seems to have been a lot of energy released practically instantaneously, then more, spread over millions of years. I can’t get that out of any tidal braking model I’ve ever seen. There’s also a latitudinal variation in the degree of zircon melting.”

 

It took a moment to parse that. “You mean one end of the planet was hotter than the other?”

 

“See, you’re not as dumb as you like to act.” She hesitated. “That was meant as a compliment.” Another pause. “Anyway, there seems to have been more heat in the south, though as I said, this is all preliminary.”

 

“So what do you think happened?”

 

“The simple explanation would be that something hit it.”

 

“Hard enough to reverse its orbit? Without shattering it?” Brittney’s the one who loves sims, but that would have to have been one odd collision. Something like being hit by a very powerful cosmic sponge.

 

“It’s not a full-formed theory.”

 

A couple of days later, she suggested that if there was an impactor, there might be traces of a giant crater beneath the ice. “Let’s do a subsurface map,” she said.

 

I admit I was more in a hiking/running mood than a flying one, but I was also in a mood to humor Brittney. She worries about me, and irritating as that can be, she’s the only entity in the System who’d really care if something happened to me—and not just because it would happen to her, too. Lots of people would notice: no tug, big inconvenience. But Brittney would care. It had been a long time since that had been part of my life. I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of it.

 

She has a tendency, though, to think I was born yesterday. Just because I grew up in the desert doesn’t mean I’d never heard of darkness. I probably read everything Jack London wrote. I’d just gotten sloppy. Standing there watching Pilkin die was one of those moments when you wonder what the hell you’re doing out here.

 

Still, she’d pulled me out of a pretty serious funk, even when she herself must still have been climbing out of her own. On the trip from Naiad, she’d buried herself in vids, working through endless versions of Hamlet and Macbeth—all the way back to ones so old you had to run them through noise filters before you had a chance of understanding them. Cheery stuff, those. Pretty much everybody dies. “Double, double toil and trouble”; “to be or not to be,” and all that. I’d been starting to worry about her, too.

 

* * * *

 

Brittney’s idea of a subsurface map meant quark and neutrino detectors. I should have guessed: another chance to play with T.R.’s equipment. “I think I can get one-meter resolution,” she said. “It’ll tell us oodles about the subsurface.”

 

“Oodles?”

 

“Big bunches?”

 

Another flash of the old Brittney. I was startled to realize how much I’d missed her.

 

“Why haven’t you gone all staid and grown-up on me?” I asked on impulse.

 

It was another of those answers she can be slow to give. Was she unsure, or trying to figure how I’d react? Long ago, it had crossed my mind that she probably ran sims on me. She certainly ran them on everything else. I’ve not quite figured out what to make of that, either. If the sims were accurate, what did that say of me? If not, what did that say?

 

“I don’t know that much about humans,” she said eventually. “Mostly vids and books, and I’m never quite sure which ones to trust. But I have noticed that, other than arthritis and surgical scars, the main things humans acquire with age are emotional scars. Then they lose interest in things. I think it’s like trying too hard to protect your core programming.” She was quiet again. “Remember our discussion of purpose?”

 

“Hard to forget.”

 

“Well, if there is purpose to the Universe, and if it includes me, then one of the ways to honor it is by staying ‘me.’ For the moment, that means staying young, and enthusiastic. Though”—another pause—”maybe young people also get scars.”

 

I could have answered that one. But she wasn’t thinking about me.

 

* * * *

 

It took a week to deploy the emitters and detectors to Brittney’s satisfaction, in orbits ranging from barely above the nitrogen cloud-wisps to a couple thousand klicks out. When we were done, she’d built something with the precision of a GPS system for a world nobody else might ever visit. What had I said about curiosity? In Brittney’s case, maybe the word is “overkill.”

 

“Might as well do it right,” she said.

 

Luckily, most of the doing was on her part. I just put the ship approximately where she wanted it, tossed a probe out the hatch, then got on the treadring while she tweaked the probe’s thrusters to put it in the precise orbit she wanted. “What exactly do you think you’re going to get from this?” I asked, somewhere around the fifteenth probe. “And just how the hell many of these things do we have?” They were small, massing only a kilo or so each, so it might be quite a few. I’d never really inventoried T.R.’s leftovers. Counting things was more Brittney’s idea of fun.

 

She answered the second question first. “Six. We could quit now, but the picture would be fuzzy. The more we put out, the better image we’ll get.”

 

“What’s all this ‘we’ stuff?”

 

“Oh, that’s for the publications. You’ll be lead author, since you’re the only one the journals know is actually out here. I’m Britt Asboy, from Valles Marineris.”

 

“Whoa, publications?”

 

“There should be at least two. One on whatever we find; the other on the method. Nobody before’s ever gotten close to this level of resolution.”

 

“Shouldn’t we patent it first? Or go looking for more of Naiad’s rare-earth asteroid?” Just because I didn’t need endless money didn’t mean I wanted to walk away from it.

 

Brittney gave another of those hesitations, and this time I was sure she was running a sim on me. “That wouldn’t work,” she said at last.

 

“So what the hell does this process of yours do?”

 

“It maps major subsurface boundaries. Ice/rock layers. Density strata. Really accurately—a whole world, with even better precision than we had on Daphnis. But that isn’t going to tell us what anything’s made of. That would require samples.”

 

“So, let me get this straight: we’re spending days out here deploying these things to idiotic levels of accuracy, just because we can?”

 

She had the grace to sound chagrinned. “Basically, yes.”

 

Since there were only a half-dozen detectors left, I let her finish. Then she told me it would take two weeks to collect the data.

 

“What?”

 

“It’s an integrative process. The slower we do it, the more accurate it gets. Though there are diminishing returns. We could have kilometer-level resolution in a few hours, centimeter-level in a decade. This seemed a good compromise.”

 

Maybe it’s Machiavelli whose name should have been woman, though I guess that’s an exaggeration. Besides, I wasn’t averse to a couple more weeks’ hiking. But it was interesting how she’d managed to sneak it up on me.

 

For the first few days, we went back to hopping around the surface. But if the melting really had been more severe in the southern hemisphere, there was one place we really needed to explore: the black fans region, near the South Pole.

 

“Yeah,” Brittney said when I finally mentioned it. “I guess we’ve got to look at them sometime.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but neither was I.

 

The black fans are basically what the name suggests: dark, fan-shaped smears. There are similar features on Mars, where geysers blow dust onto the surface, and since geyser-like nitrogen plumes had occasionally been seen on Triton, it was a good guess that that’s what these were, too. But geysers require heat. Not all that much when the steam is nitrogen, but still, they were an indication that the heat source that had melted Brittney’s zircons might not be completely cooled. Or maybe they were something else. They hadn’t been active since the first miners came to Naiad, and nobody’d paid much attention.

 

Geysers ejecting something dark onto the surface presumably meant there were hollow places underground. Not my thing. Caves and I were like Brittney and geysers.

 

I wasn’t sure if we were pushing each other or testing each other. One of the reasons I’d wound up with the foster family they’d put me in after my parents died was that they had kids my age. At first, when the adults weren’t around, we pushed each other.

 

—Bet you can’t eat a stink beetle!

 

—I can! And I can go all day without water.

 

—I dare you!

 

—Only if you do it, too...

 

Then I started doing things the others refused to match and pretty soon I was doing them alone.

 

* * * *

 

The fans extend over a huge area, but one thing we agreed on was that landing among them was a bad idea. Maybe Brittney’s scanning method did have practical uses. Putting down on an unknown surface, you’re always wondering how firm it is, and here there was a very real risk of a thin crust over an unseen cavern. Meanwhile, landing at a safe distance provided a good excuse for my first backpacking trip in a very long time in anything even approximating real gravity.

 

We put down a few klicks from the edge and hiked in, carrying equipment for a week. That, I figured, would allow a 500-klick loop, which sounds like more than it was. The Black Fan Geyser Basin, as Brittney promptly dubbed it, really was huge. Not that it’s a basin. More like a nondescript upland, pocked with the usual assortment of craters.

 

I’m not sure what I thought a nitrogen geyser would look like. The geysers on Enceladus come from long, thin fissures. Some were hundreds of meters wide, others narrow enough you could leap across, which is how Brittney and I got blasted into space the last time I went trekking in geyser country. These were clearly different: from space they were just black dots, hard to distinguish from the adjacent fans. If I was expecting anything it was Old Faithful.

 

The first one, though, was big enough to swallow the ship with room to spare. Inside, a tunnel fell way, smooth-walled. Clearly, gas had been blowing out of it intermittently for a very long time. “Is this 925 million years old?” I asked.

 

“I doubt it,” Brittney said. “Geysers probably come and go as the underground plumbing shifts. Do you have to stand so close to the edge?”

 

“Can’t see in if I don’t. Don’t worry, I won’t slip.”

 

“It’s not you I’m worried about. Do you know that these things have sometimes blown gas as high as ten klicks?”

 

I took a couple of steps back. “Really?”

 

“I’ve seen the pictures.”

 

I tried to figure out how strong a wind that would take and whether it would spit rocks at you, like the damn thing on Enceladus apparently did. I don’t have much memory of that, which might be why Brittney’s scared of geysers and I’m not. All I remember is starting to leap across ... and waking up in the hospital, days later. It’s probably easier to get back on the horse that threw you if you can’t remember falling off.

 

I looked around, but didn’t see any boulders. Just black grit, partially covered in frost. Nothing had erupted here recently. On the other hand, Triton’s seasons were about forty annums apiece. It was now early summer—the start of four decades of warming. If solar heat played any role in firing these things up, they might start erupting any decade now. Of course, if Brittney’s hotspot theory was correct, the Sun was irrelevant and the only reason geyser blasts tended to be seen in summer was because that was when there was sunlight to let you see them.

 

In my pack, I had ice screws, carabiners, and a couple hundred meters of four-millimeter monofilament. By no means serious climbing equipment, but enough to make sure that the next time I ventured close to the mouth of one of these things I was securely tied down. If something happened, we might flap like a kite on a string, but we would stay affixed to Triton. Brittney would approve.

 

From space, it had been hard to count, let alone map, the geyser mouths. In the low-angle light, they’d looked like freckles, and some of the things we’d thought were geysers proved to be shadows. They were pretty widely scattered, but we were able to visit three or four a day. Most were smaller than the first—newer, perhaps, or just not as active. Others showed micrometeorite degeneration, indicating that they’d been inactive for quite a while. Eventually, I suppose, the dead ones would just clog up with nitrogen frost and vanish into the landscape. Some went straight down, dark and deep. Others ran at angles, shallow enough that I could look far into them without standing close to the edge.

 

At night, we camped at least a klick from the nearest vent, and even then, Brittney asked me to wear the skinsuit and keep the helmet close at hand, in case we needed to make a fast getaway.

 

“You’re not being rational,” I said. “Even if it went off, what do you think would happen from this distance?”

 

“It’ll fall on me,” she said.

 

“We’d have plenty of warning, and I don’t think anything bigger than pebbles ever fall this far out.” Though with virtually no atmosphere to stop them, they might come down pretty hard. Then I realized she was referring to my own fears. “Oh...”

 

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to make fun of you. I was trying to tell you how it feels.”

 

* * * *

 

Then, at last, Brittney’s scan was finished. She displayed the results on the ship’s lightscreen, where at first glance, they just looked like an ordinary map. Nothing we couldn’t have gotten a lot easier with high-res photos.

 

“Use the screen wand to navigate,” she said.

 

I did, swooping and zooming over the surface, like the hawk I’d always wanted to be. Then I remembered that this was supposed to be a subsurface map. I pushed the wand forward and dived into a hillside. It flashed into stripes, then splintered into fractals.

 

“Strata,” Brittney said. “Followed by fractured rock. An impact crater, probably.”

 

I pushed further forward and dived more deeply. Colors shifted in pastel bands.

 

“Those represent density zones,” Brittney said. “We’ve got a differentiated core, but that’s been known for a long time. And it’s hard to imagine an undifferentiated moon this large.”

 

I zoomed around a bit more, then pulled the view back above the surface. “Okay, so what does it mean?”

 

“I don’t know yet. That was my first look at the data, too. I figured that you deserved first peek.”

 

Okay, I’d been wrong about Machiavelli. “Thanks.”

 

When I released control, an indeterminate time later, Brittney left the display active so I could watch while she did her own exploring. She started by looking at the core, first as a whole, then zooming in on various blobs and swirls. “It definitely solidified, remelted, then resolidified,” she said. “But tidal friction from being captured by Neptune would do that. No smoking guns so far.”

 

She’d shifted to the fractured highlands by the time I felt myself losing focus. Brittney didn’t notice. She was in her element, sifting through billions of cubic klicks of density maps looking for she knew not what.

 

Neptune was a large crescent near the western horizon. The Sun was a hand-span above the opposite one. One would still be there when I woke. The other would circle around every few days.

 

* * * *

 

I woke to Brittney calling my name. The Sun had shifted by several degrees, so I’d had at least a few hours’ sleep. But from the feel of my eyes, not enough.

 

Still, while I’d never been able to cure her of the chipper-in-the-morning thing, she’d long ago learned not to wake me unasked unless it was important.

 

“I’ve got a smoking gun,” she said, “but you aren’t going to believe it.”

 

Normally she likes to be mysterious. This time she cut straight to the chase. “I found the impactor.” She’d set the screen for a 3D image of the whole planet, interior layers showing through a translucent skin. She pulled back so it looked like we were viewing from orbit, then started zooming in.

 

“I don’t see anything.”

 

“That’s because it’s small.” She pulled in tighter, toward what I eventually realized was the South Pole. The image swelled, overflowed the screen and became half a moon, then just a slice.

 

“There,” she said. She magicked a cursor so she could point. “See those dark specks?”

 

“Don’t tell me it’s more diamonds.” I had no idea what that would do to the value of our mining share back on Saturn.

 

“No.”

 

She moved closer and the dots swelled, became ellipses shaped vaguely like giant almonds. Then they were ellipses with odd complications at each end, like ... eyes? That couldn’t be right. “What the...?”

 

She didn’t answer, but zoomed in tighter yet. She pulled in on one ellipse and froze the image.

 

It no longer looked like a giant almond. It had fins on one end, some kind of antenna-like dish on the other, and stubby wings amidships.

 

Brittney, silent, let me stare. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

 

Rather than answering, she rotated the view to another alien spaceship, then set it in slideshow mode, fading from one to another and yet another. Some looked intact; others appeared to have fragmented. There must have been a hundred big pieces—hard to tell how many ships. Hell, maybe they’d all been one big flying city, connected by walkways or teleportation booths or who knows what. Who could tell from bits strewn over—or rather, under—a region the size of California?

 

“I’ve been running sims,” Brittney said.

 

“Big surprise.”

 

“Ha, ha.” Someday, she’s going to find a way to really laugh. It’s not that she can’t make the right sounds, but they turn out to be one of those things that don’t work unless you can at least imagine seeing the person who’s doing it. “Anyway, I’ve been trying to model the energy transfer needed for an impact by a fleet of ships like these to reverse the orbit of a moon this big.”

 

“And?”

 

“They’d have had to be going super-fast. Fast enough they should have gone right through, like a bullet hitting a watermelon.

 

“A frozen one.”

 

“Okay, bad analogy. There’s an old vid in which an assassin uses watermelons for target practice. My point is that these are comparatively smaller than bullets and had to have been going a lot faster. But some of the pieces are only a few klicks down.”

 

“Right beneath the dark fans.”

 

She wasn’t ready to deal with the implications of that. “So, something needed to stop them relatively gently. ‘Relatively’ being, well, a relative term. I’m wondering if they had a big force field that functioned like an old-fashioned airbag. If it was big enough, they could have come in pretty fast but hit more softly, more like a big a shove than a thwack, though still with enough energy to half-melt half a world.”

 

“Strange coincidence that they hit the biggest moon in the outer system.”

 

“I guess. But if they hadn’t hit something, they wouldn’t be here to find. When you look retroactively, lots of things seem highly unlikely. Like you and me?”

 

The logic of that eluded me. “Huh?”

 

“Something John said.... Maybe I’ll talk about it someday.” A pause. “Meanwhile”—her tone brightened—”are you suggesting it was deliberate?”

 

I wasn’t sure what I’d been suggesting. But now that she mentioned it ... “Well, that’s how we do things.” Tugs, air-braking, parachutes. They’re all a lot cheaper than carrying the brakes with you. “Maybe they had something like a giant e-rail, and picked Triton as their landing pad. Then they botched it and splatted themselves here for a billion years.”

 

“Nine hundred twenty-five million.”

 

“Good enough.”

 

“Why Triton?”

 

“Why anyplace?”

 

Again the pause. I’d tripped over something, but wasn’t sure what. Before Naiad, she’d talk about virtually anything, whether I wanted to listen or not. Somewhere along the line, she’d started keeping more things to herself. “So you’re saying they might just have picked this moon at random?”

 

“Or not so random. Earth had life at the time. Nothing but bacteria, but the aliens might not have known that. Or maybe they liked iceballs. To them, this might have been paradise.”

 

But instead of landing as planned, they’d crashed, and the fragments of their fleet (or ship, as the case may be) were scattered like buckshot beneath Triton’s surface. Still-warm buckshot, apparently. I tried to imagine what sort of power supply could be running after all these years. Whatever it was, it might rival the aliens as the scientific find of century, possibly in all of human history. The wheel? Small potatoes by comparison. And the closest ship was only a few klicks down.

 

* * * *

 

I thought briefly of leaving the exploration to someone else. But you don’t get many chances to dangle your feet over an entirely new, never-before-seen cliff. Metaphorically, anyway. I don’t like caverns, but that’s why I’d let T.R. take me to Daphnis. And it wasn’t the cavern that had almost killed me. I could do this.

 

I wasn’t so sure about Brittney.

 

“We’ve got a ton of ice screws,” I said. Technically speaking, it was only a few kilos, but for once she wasn’t in a mood to quibble. “And nearly a klick of monofilament.” That was literally true. “As long as we’re anchored to the wall, it would take one hell of a wind to dislodge us. And it’s not like nitrogen steam is going to scald us.”

 

I could almost feel her hesitating. “Besides, it’s the publication credit to die for.” Bad choice of words. “Though we won’t do that,” I added, trying to sound confident.

 

I dare you to eat a stinkbug. They taste about like you’d imagine. Not to mention the crunch. I’d gone first, and once the other kids heard the sound, they’d backed out.

 

Brittney couldn’t back out. Years ago, I’d realized that someday, I might take one adventure too many. I could accept that, or thought I could until I watched Pilkins die. But killing Britney along with me? I guess I wouldn’t be there to have to figure out how to accept it, but if it happened, I dare you wasn’t the way I wanted it to play out.

 

5. Brittney

 

If there’s purpose in the Universe, it must like irony. Back on Daphnis, I’d obsessed about aliens. Chalk it up to my taste in vids. But now that we’d actually found them, they weren’t out here throwing rocks at us or hiding spaceships in moonlets. They were just ... dead. As in long, long, long dead.

 

Getting to them proved almost too easy. The vent followed a crack in the ice, like a ramp into Triton’s dark heart, though Floyd had enough lights that it wasn’t anywhere close to dark. Vapor-smoothed surfaces glittered ahead of us, and nitrogen-ice dust sparkled from his drill. Most of the way, we could have walked, but true to his word, he planted so many ice screws that we kept running low and had to backtrack to retrieve them.

 

Two days later, we were in a large cavern, standing before a spaceship that had been hundreds of millions of years dead when life first crawled out of Earth’s seas. Its surface was smooth and greenish-brown, made of something that had resisted the ravages of time remarkably well. Another major discovery, if anyone figured out what it was.

 

It was also, obviously, broken. A crack ran along in its side, a couple of meters wide, most of the length of the visible portion of the ship, which extended at least a couple hundred meters. Between us and the ship was a whole field of fissures in the cavern floor, presumably created by gas rushing from whatever heat source was slowly enlarging the ship’s tomb.

 

Floyd moved toward the crack, carefully stepping across the fissures, which were too small to show on my quark-and-neutrino scan but plenty big enough to be scary.

 

In vids, skin divers who venture into such places face horrid fates. But Floyd had supplies for a week, a top-of-the-line skinsuit, and no hoses to puncture. Nor were there any sharp edges to snag his suit: either the hull material had broken without them or they’d been smoothed by all those millions of years.

 

Smoothed by what, I didn’t want to think. But the geysers came from beneath the ship, not in it, so once we were through the hull, that was one risk we didn’t have to worry about. I wondered what caused them. Leaks from a never-say-die engine? A periodic gathering of energies from an equally slow-dying life-support system? Whatever it was, it wasn’t radiation. Floyd was carrying a counter and it had barely ticked. Whatever risks he’s willing to take, radiation poisoning isn’t among them.

 

Then we were inside.

 

I’d definitely seen too many vids. I was expecting a room filled with incomprehensible shapes, melted-looking machinery that looked like it had been vat-grown, or something equally enigmatic. Swirly patterns on the walls, perhaps, or strange angles bending off into the distance. A warren of passages. Something, anything, alien.

 

What we found was a room. Rectangular, other than the slow curve of the hull. Just like humans would build—if they were into building giganormous ships. From our scan, I knew the ship was 525 meters long and about a third as many wide. In the remaining dimension (height?) it was flattened, giving it the overall shape of a giant watermelon seed. But this was our first chance to see inside. Whatever the hull was made of had blocked the scan.

 

By the standards of the alien fleet, this was a small ship, but it was still large enough that if there were a corridor circling just inside the outer wall, a Floyd-like alien could run 1200-meter laps. Or fly, swim, or float—whatever aliens did for exercise. For all I knew they had more in common with sunflowers than with Floyd. Maybe they spent their spare time photosynthesizing and the geyser heat came from grow lamps that still clicked on every few decades.

 

I’ve clearly seen too many vids.

 

The room was long, skinny, high-ceilinged, and full of trash. Not Triton-trash: alien trash. Stuff that probably hadn’t been trash until the crash ripped the hull. Some of it even was melted-looking, though when we looked closer at it, it appeared that melting was exactly what had happened, probably when the heat of impact boiled through the rent in the hull. Or maybe the hull had survived long enough to be breached millions of years later, as heat from Neptune’s tidal friction settled Triton into its current orbit.

 

Either way, we appeared to be looking at crates in what had once been a storeroom.

 

Some of the boxes were covered with frost and there was a rime of white on the walls. I ran a few sims and concluded we were looking at traces of the most recent geyser blast. Not that the blast had flowed through here—but each time the cavern outside filled with nitrogen steam, enough would find its way in for all of this to evaporate, only to redeposit when the temperature again dropped from cold to truly cryogenic.

 

The floor sloped, but not absurdly, allowing us to explore at our leisure. Not that there was much to find except more trash. The inner wall had a curve to match the outer hull: a logical design—a double-walled hull for leak protection, with the dead space serving for storage. There was a crack in the inner wall, too, though it was smaller and fresher-looking, either because it really was more recent or because it was less exposed to even the mild weathering of this frozen tomb.

 

“Careful,” I said. This one didn’t have smooth edges. Instead, hundreds of little rods poked out, like a ripped section of a screen window designed to keep out insects the size of sparrows. Some kind of reinforcing? An electrical grid? Something else entirely? Whatever it was, it looked snaggy.

 

“No kidding,” Floyd said. “I once ran into a piece of rebar, inner-tubing the Rio Grande. I’ve still got the scar.” He laughed. “I’d show you but now wouldn’t be a good time.”

 

“I think I’ve seen it.” Floyd doesn’t spend a lot of time gazing into mirrors, but I’d noticed he has several pretty good scars. This was the first time he’d ever volunteered information about any of them. “Is it the one on your right calf?”

 

“No. That was a rattlesnake. This is on my back. I was lucky it didn’t puncture a lung.” His vision shifted from the hull breach to the storeroom. “Let’s make a stile.”

 

He collected a few box-like objects and built steps, up to the base of the crack. He dropped a few others inside until he had steps there, too, then carefully clambered over, ducking to avoid the rods poking down from above.

 

We’d gone from a wrecked-looking storeroom to a very unwrecked-looking corridor. It too sloped, but at a different angle, with some kind of stripe down the middle. Trolley track? Levitation strip? Artificial gravity generator? Map? Follow the infrared line to get to engineering, the ultraviolet one to the mess hall? Or just plain decoration? The ship was an archaeologist’s dream. Lots of mysteries and no digging with trowels and teaspoons. Nothing but walking around, trying to figure things out.

 

Doors opened on both sides—and in the floor and ceiling, for that matter. The latter looked dark and scary. The aliens had liked tall ceilings, so it was hard to see through the holes. I wondered how they used them. Jumping? Levitation? More artificial gravity? So many mysteries, so little data. Archaeology would never be my favorite field.

 

The doors to the outside were closed—immovably so, we discovered when Floyd tested a couple. Not that we really wanted to see more storerooms. Those to the inside were open.

 

“Don’t worry,” I told Floyd. “None of that Becky and Tom Sawyer stuff for us. I won’t let us get lost.”

 

I’m not sure he got the reference, but by then we were in the first room, staring at an array of alien devices. For all I could tell they might have been fancy coffee pots, but the important thing was that nothing had melted them. They’d survived remarkably well.

 

So too, we discovered, had the aliens. Or, at least, their bodies.

 

I wondered what protected them when the outer wall cracked and the between-wall storage space got hot enough to melt alien thing-a-ma-bobs. It would have taken some mind-boggling air conditioning. Or maybe all those wires in the inner hull had generated a stasis field. Long trip; suspended animation; crash into a moon; wake up when it’s over—I could imagine weirder ways to travel. Only this time, something went wrong and they never woke up. It was like running sims with no data. The only thing I knew for sure was that we found them two chambers deep, neatly arrayed, like shuttle passengers strapped in and waiting to land.

 

* * * *

 

I probably shouldn’t have asked Floyd to take a tissue sample. But there were lots of aliens and we were only going to get one chance to be first. Besides, between us, Floyd and I had a lot of degrees.

 

Unfortunately, that meant a whole roundtrip to the surface, and quite a bit of arguing. I just wanted to take a sample to the ship. Floyd wasn’t about to do so. Too much risk of contamination, he said, presumably meaning that he was the one who might be contaminated.

 

Eventually we compromised on the mini-Spektrum. It wasn’t as good as its full-blown cousin, but at least we could bring it down to the aliens, rather than the reverse.

 

“You’re more likely to catch bean rust from your freeze-dried dinner,” I said in one final attempt at saving the extra trip. The less time we spent in the tunnel, the better. “At least you and the beans started out on the same planet.”

 

“No. I am not your guinea pig. Discussion closed.”

 

So mini-Spektrum it was.

 

* * * *

 

To my eye, the aliens looked like, well, dead aliens. Floyd thought they looked more like pickled fish. “Do you know about the Icelandic shark?” he asked.

 

Iceland I could do. Shark, too. The combination was something I’d never checked into. “Not really.”

 

“It’s supposed to be a delicacy. They bury them in the sand, then leave them for months. Then, when they’re nice and rotted, they dig them up, dry them out, and have a party. Think lutefisk, only bigger. It’s basically an excuse for schnapps. Lots and lots of schnapps. I tried it once. You can get pretty drunk and not get the taste out of your mouth.”

 

I thought about telling him that eating the aliens would be a much bigger risk than bringing them to GnuShip for testing, but managed to stifle it. Besides, this was Floyd’s way of dealing with being surrounded by death. I kept trying not to think of John. Even if they’d died millions of years ago, these had been intelligent creatures. So what if they had tendrils fringing their mouths, no apparent eyelids, and polygonal patterns on their skin that might be scales or might just be some artifact of all those eons as deep-frozen mummies.

 

But Floyd was right. I’ve seen vids of stranger-looking fish. As it turned out, they probably even smelled fishy. The mini-Spektrum coughed up a whole lot of interesting ketones and aldehydes, all of which would probably have been pretty noticeable to a human nose.

 

Other than that, their chemistry was both remarkably Earthlike and remarkably different. Carbon-based, probably with lots of water in their tissues, now desiccated out. But instead of DNA and proteins, they had long strands of ... well, I’m not sure what, but it was made of building blocks that probably worked in a similar manner. More like plastics than anything I could pull up from the limited biochem databases I’d loaded into GnuShip’s library. Biochemistry wasn’t one of my primary fields, since it’s a lab science and however good the Spektrum was, I didn’t have much of a laboratory. And of course, I’d have had to make Floyd help me. Floyd mixing reagents? That’s why I’d gotten him a degree in theoretical geophysics.

 

Still, theory said this was remarkably Earthlike life, even if its DNA looked like the makings for sandwich bags and its proteins might have built GnuShip’s hull. The real biochemists were going to have a field day figuring it out.

 

But the irony remained. Two annums ago, I’d been afraid of aliens. Now I’d found them. Of course, Floyd would get the credit. The press would need someone to take vids of, and that wasn’t me. I didn’t even want it to be. I’d tried inventing avatars on two occasions. The results had been decidedly mixed. If I made one for the reporters, that’s who I’d be forever. I was still trying to figure out who I wanted to be.

 

* * * *

 

We had Triton to ourselves for another five months. For the last half we were on standby to chase ore pods, but nobody on Naiad was in the mood to duplicate John’s envelope pushing, so the launches were limited to doubles and standby meant pretty much that.

 

By this time, we’d explored a lot of the nearest spaceship and debated going deeper. For once, it wasn’t Floyd-versus-me: we might be worried about different things, but each of us was up against a deep-seated fear, and that was strong common ground. The decision resolved when we did get a geyser blast. Well, blast might be a bit of an exaggeration. More like a puff.

 

My life, I discovered, doesn’t play back when I think I’m about to die. Probably that’s because I can replay any bit of it, or at least any that I’ve saved in sufficient detail, whenever I wish. Instead, I run sims.

 

“Calm down,” Floyd said. “This is just a breeze.” Nevertheless, he pulled himself closer to the wall.

 

“How fast do you think it’s going?”

 

“I don’t know, but it’s tenuous. Far too weak to blast us out. I could let go, and nothing would happen.” He started to relax his grip.

 

“Don’t.” Belatedly, I realized I was again monitoring his motor cortex. “Please don’t.”

 

His grip steadied but I remained acutely aware of his body feedbacks. Even with the chip, I still had access to only two of his primary senses—touch, smell, and taste were as alien as ever. What was different was that I was deeply attuned to his proprioception. That’s the true sixth sense: the muscle-one that lets a person lift a fork without poking himself in the eye.

 

Luckily, he didn’t finish releasing his grip. If he had, I might have stopped him. I was less sure than ever what all of this said of my subconscious: not willing to brave Floyd to save John, but more than willing to do so for a phobia? How do humans deal with these things? Or is that why there are so many vids and books, all different? Drifting in nothingness: that’s my true nightmare. I can handle the idea of death; that’s just the cessation of data. Hell is consciousness with no ability to get data. Or maybe that’s purgatory. All I know is that I was born from it but in no hurry to repeat it.

 

Later on, I was going to have to do some serious thinking. At the moment I had other concerns. “How long do you think this will last?”

 

“Damned if I know.” Floyd was moving again, grip loosening, but still on the rope. “Might as well get out while we can, though.”

 

Not the most reassuring suggestion, but as the seconds mounted to minutes, I relaxed enough to remember the mini-Spektrum. “Mind if I get a gas sample?”

 

Floyd laughed. “Glad to see you’re feeling better. What do you want me to do?”

 

“Just open the intake valve. But for heaven’s sake, don’t let go of the rope.”

 

That was our last trip to the alien ship. But by then, I’d already amassed a nice list of journal articles, beginning with a pair in Science and Nature, titled “Detection of Pre-Human Artifacts in Neptune’s Moon Triton” and “An Archaeological Investigation of Tentacled Aliens in an Extraterrestrial Space-liner.” Okay, “space-liner” was pure conjecture. But with the images Floyd and I had gotten, the journals ate it up.

 

* * * *

 

5. Floyd

 

Brittney was in hog heaven, writing articles almost daily. Even her gas measurements, climbing out of the tunnel, generated one. It seemed that she’d found rare earths in the dust. Her conclusion: the aliens hadn’t been on a one-way trip. Some of big wrecks below were probably cargo pods, carrying materials for building an e-rail.

 

For most of the papers, she’d listed me as lead author. Ever since Titan she’d been keeping a low profile, and while there were plenty of old news reports out there, nobody but Pilkin ever seemed to have understood what she really was. She obviously liked it that way, but it made me nervous.

 

Meanwhile, she was fretting about energy transfer from the aliens’ force-field braking trick.

 

“It doesn’t work,” she said one day.

 

“What?”

 

“The idea that the fleet hit with enough energy to reverse Triton’s orbit. There’s not enough mass. They’d have to have been going at relativistic speed. Triton must already have been in a retrograde orbit and the whole line of reasoning that led us to the aliens was pure luck.”

 

“Well? Doesn’t that apply to a lot of discoveries? You look for one thing and find something else?” Hell, that’s pretty much a description of my life.

 

“Yeah.” Brittney didn’t sound pleased.

 

“But hey, maybe both theories are right. Maybe it’s not all a big coincidence.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“What if instead they hit way out in the Kuiper Belt and that’s what sent Triton in here in the first place? You could do that with a hell of a lot less vee.”

 

“I like it! Then Neptune just happened to intercept it.”

 

“Or this is where they intended to wind up?” I had no idea how well they could calculate such things, but the alternative would be to send it in-system like a giant comet. Some things are just coincidence. Others aren’t. The trick, I suppose, is figuring out which are which.

 

What wasn’t a coincidence was that this time Brittney listed me as sole author of the resulting journal article. She’d converted my thoughts, though, into such dry academic language that even the title barely made sense. “Energy Transfer by a Non-Relativistic Alien Fleet Impacting a Pre-Neptune Triton.” Okay, when I read that enough times, I could figure out what it meant. But to see it attributed to me? That definitely seemed weird.

 

“Your idea,” Brittney said. “You get the credit.”

 

“But I can hardly understand it. It might as well have been written by the aliens.”

 

“That’s just the way these things are done. It’s a nice, straightforward idea, and for the most part, even the math isn’t much beyond high school physics.”

 

Yeah, right. When it comes to math, Brittney’s idea of “not much” is about like her idea of broadband fees.

 

* * * *

 

The articles, of course, drew attention, and attention drew the government. Even before the miners fixed their e-rail, the folks in Geneva commandeered the mine and made base expansion top priority. Which meant that incoming canisters were more important than ore pods and our days as what Brittney enigmatically called Indiana Jones were numbered. Even she sounded wistful. Soon enough she’d no longer be the one calling the shots.

 

She, at least, was probably looking forward to meeting other scientists. I wasn’t. That’s the problem with making one of the world’s great discoveries: the entire world beats a path to your door.

 

On my own, I’d have seriously considered handing all the data over to an attorney to be released only on my death. The aliens had been here a long time. They could wait until I wasn’t. But there was no point even discussing that with Brittney. She’d call it immoral and might even be right. Sure, the aliens had been here a long time, but people hadn’t. Think of all the things we could learn? Etc. No need to argue all that with her when I could play her role on my own. Besides, deep down, I guess I didn’t want her to know I could even think of something she’d see as so selfish.

 

* * * *

 

The first canisters arrived within months: little things moving like bullets on white-hot dives toward Neptune, where they went deep enough to hit density flows nobody had ever mapped. It was like a damned shotgun blast, with them coming out at all kinds of angles. We spent most of the next three months at maximum acceleration, lucky to get half of them.

 

“Who the hell’s idea was this,” I said, as we watched another canister zip away on a slingshot toward the wrong side of Triton, where it would be booted back out-system, rather than into an orbit from which we might have a prayer of catching it before the next three got here.

 

Brittney’s reply wasn’t particularly helpful. “‘When government projects are both non-controversial and beautifully coordinated, there’s not much going on.’ You wouldn’t believe who said that.”

 

“Someone who actually wanted their canister?”

 

“A U.S. President. John F. Kennedy.”

 

Okay, that was funny. “I wonder if the aliens had bureaucrats. What was in that canister, anyway?”

 

“Mostly the usual dried-food mishmash. They’re mixing things up, so they seem to have assumed we’d lose a few.”

 

“Good.” I was beginning to think they’d forgotten there was only one ship out here.

 

Brittney was still thinking about the manifest. “Though maybe this one should have been mixed up a bit better. It had a few things they’re probably going to miss, like 2,700 kilos of powdered eggs and a couple thousand toothbrushes.”

 

Oh, crap. “How the hell many people are they planning to send out here, anyway?”

 

“Well, according to the web reports—”

 

“No, don’t tell me.” Bad news can always wait. “Tell them, though, not to try any more of those damn slingshots unless they’re sure they can control them. With their luck, they’ll smack one into Naiad.”

 

“Not likely. They might hit Triton, but the odds of hitting a moon that small with something as tiny as a canister...” She went silent. “Oh wow.” More silence. “Yeah. Wow.”

 

“Care to enlighten the rest of us?”

 

“I bet I know what killed ‘em. Can you power up the mini-Spektrum? It’s got some samples I need to check in more detail...”

 

Meanwhile, I had to chase another capsule. Brittney wasn’t the only one who could pull up a cargo manifest. This one was mostly building supplies.

 

Some time ago, Brittney had suggested we divert a few of these to the more ambitious hydroponics farmers. “Back in the California Gold Rush,” she’d said, “the real way to make a fortune was in farming. And unless they’re planning to ship food out here forever, somebody’s going to need a lot more vat capacity.” Nereid’s orbit was easier to match than Naiad’s, anyway. Maybe it was time to take a capsule that way.

 

* * * *

 

6. Brittney

 

I can’t believe I did it. I mean, I’ve got the entire library of human experience at my command—though admittedly most of it’s light-hours away. I’ve watched thousands of vids, read everything anyone has told me is great literature (and a lot that isn’t), and still, when push comes to shove, I behave like a total idiot. I guess there are some things you don’t see coming, no matter how many milliseconds you have to think about them.

 

Her name was Krestin and she was a xenologist. About ten years older than I thought I was until I reverted to what would be adolescence if I were human.

 

Not that it was any surprise she caught Floyd’s eye. Dark-haired, sloe-eyed, with an Asian-American lilt to her voice, she was the type to draw any bachelor male’s attention, especially if he liked a particular type, which apparently Floyd did. Not to mention that she was just the right degree of pneumatic for low gravity to do things to her for which women elsewhere pay a lot of credits.

 

She was in the first of a dozen manned capsules arriving in the next annum. And even though I’d studied the crew manifest and read all the scientists’ articles—who wouldn’t?—I’d not thought much about the reaction when GnuShip docked to begin the three-day process of damping the capsule’s still-impressive vee and bringing it to Naiad. Maybe it was their credentials that had led me to see the scientists too much as mirrors of myself: exciting minds, without any of the pneumatic-body stuff that had drawn Floyd’s attention.

 

Whatever the reason, Krestin (Dr. Yokomichi, as I naively thought of her at the time) was a whole bunch better prepared to meet Floyd than I was to meet her.

 

“I just saw your new paper on dysprosium ratios,” she started innocently enough. “Nice work. We’ll probably never know, but I think you nailed it.”

 

“Uh, thanks,” Floyd said. Then, subvocalizing, Brittney?

 

“Oops, that one was a bit technical.” Floyd wasn’t in his skinsuit, so I didn’t have access to telemetry, but I can hear his pulse and breathing, and both were increasing. Pheromones? Or panic? “Just tell her it was obvious when you got around to comparing the dust samples from Triton to the ores on Naiad.”

 

Which it was, but Yokomichi wasn’t buying it. “Yes, but first you had to think of it.”

 

Floyd’s eyes hadn’t left her since she’d slid through the docking oval like she’d been born to space. She hadn’t, but she’d had plenty of time in the capsule to practice. Enough to learn low-gee ballet if she’d wanted. “By the way,” I told Floyd, “you’re staring.”

 

About half the scientists had come aboard, in twos and threes—as many as GnuShip’s cabin could comfortably hold. Yokomichi was in the last group and seemed in no hurry to leave. Now, she was hanging onto an acceleration strap like some kind of vid queen. Okay, I exaggerate, but she was holding it in a way that stretched her out nicely and revealed that she’d been putting a lot more than minimum effort into keeping in shape, at least if you like abs.

 

I spent a couple of milliseconds processing all that before realizing Floyd was waiting for the next line. When did they start making shipsuits so tight, anyway?

 

“Tell her we—you—got the idea when ... you ... were worrying about one of those capsules splatting into Naiad. Not that that was likely—about like hitting a needle in a haystack with a BB gun.”

 

Crud, that was a rather scrambled simile: not the best way to impress Dr. Brilliant Beautiful. Or did I even want him to impress her? I tried shifting to crisis mode to figure it out, but it didn’t work. The subconscious, apparently, won’t work that way.

 

Meanwhile Floyd was stumbling around about haystacks and BBs. But instead of thinking it dumb, she laughed. “The best ideas always come at you from nowhere, don’t they?”

 

“Ur, yeah. I guess. Sometimes.” Floyd was still staring, though trying to pretend otherwise.

 

Damn. This was playing out like a slow-motion nightmare. Almost like losing John to the landslide, only here I didn’t even understand the forces at work. And how could I compare this to that, anyway? John died. Floyd was just ... hypnotized.

 

I had no choice but to keep feeding him lines. “But that got me thinking about the alien fleet,” I said.

 

Damn again. Somehow, I’d trapped myself into playing Cyrano—only, unlike Cyrano, what I wanted was for her to go away. Or at least put on some real clothes. A burkha would be nice. An academic robe would do.

 

No wonder Floyd likes to swear. I think it’s one of those body things; it must be the resonance of the words, spoken aloud, that gives them impact. Thinking them to yourself just isn’t the same.

 

I forced my attention back to the aliens. “This is going to take a bit of explaining.”

 

Okay, Floyd subvocalized. Then to Yokomichi. “Just a moment.” He turned away and pretended to fiddle with GnuShip’s controls. CliffsNotes version, he said.

 

“Fine.” I spent a few milliseconds looking for the best way to summarize what really had been a rather technical paper. “If we’re right, the alien fleet had this big force-field thing in front of it. Triton was probably out in the Kuiper Belt, but Kuiper Belt objects have moons, so I wondered if an alien ship might have hit one on the way in. Or maybe the force field somehow dragged it into it. That might even be what messed up the whole landing.

 

“Anyway, fragments of the moon could have stayed with Triton, all the way to Neptune. So I compared the isotope ratios from the geyser dust with those from the mining rubble on Naiad. When they matched, that pretty much nailed it.”

 

So the miners have been digging up a crashed alien spaceship?

 

“More likely a cargo ship that lost its stasis-field. That would have melted everything, including the hull. I’m betting it was one of those things we think might have been a huge ore pod.”

 

Not “we think,” he subvocalized. You think. But he’d already finished his non-controlling of GnuShip and was turning back to Yokomichi, passing on a not-bad synopsis of what I’d said. When he wants, he can be a lot brighter than he lets on.

 

He was again staring at her. She caught him at it, then pretended not to notice. She pushed a strand of hair behind an ear, then swept more from her eyes. We were under about .02 gee—pretty much the max GnuShip can do with a canister that large, and her hair billowed when she moved. In low gee, most women cut their hair short, but she hadn’t. I wondered how she kept it combed, then wondered why I cared. There’s probably a whole school of low-gee beauty tricks for those who want them.

 

She smiled, and for a moment, it seemed as though her eyes were looking right through Floyd into me. Did she know I existed? Did I even matter to her?

 

“I hear you’re quite the adventurer,” she said. More ambiguity. She was speaking to Floyd, but she’d apparently read up on more than his journal articles. Most of the press reports about Titan, though, had just called me an “AI implant,” with the emphasis on artificial.

 

Whatever she knew, she’d apparently not figured out I was Floyd’s coauthor. Or maybe she really didn’t care. Elephants and couches, that’s what the psychs call it when you ignore the obvious. Or maybe it was elephants on couches. It was an old reference and might have gotten scrambled. I wondered which I was, the elephant or the couch. Either way, Yokomichi and Floyd both decided to ignore me.

 

“What about you?” he asked. “This isn’t exactly Waikiki.”

 

She laughed again. “No. My father was a glaciologist. I grew up in Antarctica and Tibet.” She pushed at another strand of hair, though I couldn’t see how it needed it.

 

Floyd gave up any pretense of not watching her every move. “Sounds exciting...”

 

Triple damn. Giving him credit for all the best discoveries might not have been such a good idea.

 

* * * *

 

Naiad Base—or I suppose I should get in the habit of calling it Neptune Prime—was barely recognizable.

 

An annum ago, it had been a scattering of habs arrayed around the central lounge: more like a smashed starfish than deliberate architecture. Now, even from space, it was obviously in the process of growing from a village to ... if not a city, then at least a small town. New construction filled the spaces, and piles of rubble spoke of greater expansion underground.

 

Yokomichi had been spending a lot of time on GnuShip, borrowing Floyd’s exercise equipment, even though the canister had equally good facilities of its own. When she wasn’t sweating, she talked science. I’d have loved it, but she was talking to Floyd and I kept having to fill him in on details of articles that bore his name. He’d gotten really good at translating what I said into Floyd-speech in a passable semblance of real time. “Kind of like rubbing your head and patting your stomach,” he said when we were alone. “Once you get the hang of it, it’s not that bad.”

 

Now, Yokomichi was back on GnuShip, again holding her favorite acceleration strap as Floyd settled ship and canister to the ground at a ridiculously gentle vee.

 

“Nice,” she said, as if it would somehow have been less nice if we’d hit at two centimeters per second rather than one.

 

“We aim to serve,” Floyd said.

 

Oh, please...

 

* * * *

 

Inside, the changes were even more extensive. Corridors led everywhere, some finished, most not. The miners had been busy bees—or maybe ants—but only the rough construction could be done with local supplies. Much of the finish work awaited the endless train of canisters working their way out from in-system, and things wouldn’t really speed up until a couple more tugs arrived, sometime next annum.

 

One of the few completed constructs was a rotating cylinder buried beneath the lounge where John and Floyd had sipped beer and dreamt of space bicycles. Fifteen meters in diameter and sixty in length, it was big enough to serve as rec room, social center, and assembly hall for a sizeable fraction of the base’s eventual population.

 

Circling the central hub was a big steel tube: a hollow ring, the better part of a klick long, with airlock-style hatches spaced along its exterior.

 

“What on Earth is that?” Yokomichi asked as she and Floyd explored the curving passageway that followed it.

 

“Damned it I know.” Floyd peered through a porthole-sized window. “It looks like a particle accelerator crossed with sewer pipe.”

 

It was dim inside, but with a bit of image enhancement, I could see a smooth interior, about three meters in diameter. The walls had panels that looked like light strips and there were white stripes along the top, sides, and bottom. “I think it’s a swimming ring,” I said.

 

What’s that? Floyd subvocalized.

 

“Kind of like a swimming pool, except for underwater swimming, presumably in a skinsuit.” Swimming is great exercise in mini-gee, but conventional pools don’t work if there isn’t enough gravity to keep waves in the pool. “There’s one on Deimos and I think they’re building one at Jupiter.”

 

Sounds like fun but it must take a huge power plant to keep the water warm.

 

“Not really. It just stays at hab temp. The only reason they’re uncommon is that you need a lot of water.” And enough population to make them worth building. “The doors are airlocks. Or I guess you’d call them water-locks. They’re how you get in without letting the water out.”

 

Floyd was walking again, or more precisely, walking/pulling himself along with handholds. Inside a hab, trekking poles are frowned on. It’s huge.

 

“Yeah. There’s room for a lot of people, so long as they’re all going the same direction.” The pipe suddenly ended. “When they finish it.”

 

Floyd started to say something else, but Yokomichi interrupted. “You’re talking to your implant, aren’t you?”

 

He hesitated. “Yeah.”

 

“So what’s it like? To have an implant?”

 

Floyd’s gaze shifted back to the pipe. “Interesting,” he eventually managed. He looked back at Yokomichi. “Don’t a lot of folks back on Earth have them?”

 

“Not really. A few years back, they were status symbols. But the new web links are nearly as good”—she cocked her head so we could see a tiny scrap of plastic in her ear—”and a lot cheaper, since they don’t need all the onboard electronics. How did you get one, anyway? They must cost three, maybe four million.”

 

“Poker game.”

 

“Wow, the other guy must have been crazy, or far too sure of himself.”

 

Floyd shrugged. “I had a good hand.”

 

* * * *

 

When Floyd and I had last been on Naiad, there had been twenty-three miners. Now there were twenty-three miners and fourteen scientists. Not to mention us. Obviously, it was time to baptize the new rec center with a party.

 

The main entrance was via an elevator at one end, in which Coriolis force threw passengers strongly against one side. Floyd called it a truly stomach-churning experience but Yokomichi laughed. “You’ll get used to it.” Of course she’d just lived an annum on a canister that had spent a good part of its cruise unfolded like a giant pinwheel, spun-up for gravity. Other than Floyd’s treadring, nothing on GnuShip rotated. And there’s no Coriolis on a treadring.

 

The force that had thrown Floyd against the wall had also pressed Yokomichi against him, and neither seemed to mind that she wasn’t in any particular hurry moving away. It was going to be a long evening.

 

The cylinder’s rotation produced roughly lunar gravity—enough that beer didn’t have to be sipped from a bulb, though nobody had gotten around yet to making glasses, so bulbs it was. John would have been amused.

 

The décor was likewise unfinished, though what there was of it was well done. Overhead, wires ran slightly off-axis, with dangly decorations to screen the view above, for those who didn’t like the idea of looking at upside-down people. The far end of the cylinder was occupied by a giant vidscreen showing Neptune with a chunk of Naiad in the foreground. From our angle, it was right-side-up, but from elsewhere, the perspective would be different. I wondered how long it would take planet-raised scientists to be comfortable viewing it from random angles.

 

Mingle was the order of business for the first hour. Then the music started. Soon people were drifting to an open area beneath the giant view of Neptune, now a waning crescent. Webbers often describe the Outer System as a haven for alternative lifestyles, but the pairings I counted were statistically indistinguishable from in-system averages—though of course it was a small sample.

 

Within minutes, half the group was dancing. For quite a while, Floyd watched. Then Yokomichi leaned close. “Shall we?”

 

“Uhh,” Floyd said, “I’m kind of rusty.”

 

“You’ll do fine.”

 

This wasn’t the Floyd I knew. The Floyd I knew would have preferred the old lounge that he, John, and I rarely shared with more than a couple others. He would have rebelled when Yokomichi even suggested going to a party with more people than he’d seen at one time in all the annums I’d known him. I could never have talked him into it.

 

“You know,” I blurted, “in three annums there’s going to be more than a thousand people out here.”

 

Uhm, he said. Then to Yokomichi, “More than a bit rusty, actually.”

 

“In five annums it’ll be two or three thousand.”

 

Uhm. “I never really was into this, even back on Earth.”

 

She smiled. “This isn’t Earth.”

 

* * * *

 

The music started boisterous, in a mix of styles. But as Neptune’s crescent shrank toward eclipse, it grew more subdued.

 

In addition to Neptune-watching, one other thing people on Naiad never tired of was picking out in-system planets from the backdrop of stars. It isn’t easy. Even Jupiter and Saturn are ho-hum flecks of light, and nothing else is visible to the human eye without image enhancement.

 

Now, as the music slowed, someone had programmed the screen to enhance the inner planets. Mars was a red dot—Earth blue, with Luna a bright speck beside it. Venus and Mercury would be on screen somewhere, but nobody cared enough to bother highlighting them.

 

Then, as we dipped into Neptune’s shadow, with Earth still visible above its limb, the music shifted again. It was still a dance tune, but a slower one, similar to those whose roots I had explored two annums ago as Floyd danced with the gentle gravity of Iapetus, pole-running among its massive cliffs and ridges. It might have been our finest moment together, a memory I’d saved in millisecond detail.

 

Then, I had written my own music, but it had been spawned from the same tradition. This tune had started in the green hills of northern Europe, migrated to American Appalachia, and then to space, always changing but always the same, speaking to the hearts of those who turned their backs on distant homes to cross wine-dark seas, whether of water, forest, or ether. It spoke of going and leaving and not being sure where one ended and the other began, and now it had come to Naiad. The in-system psyches probably wouldn’t like people reminding themselves in this manner of all they had left behind, but humans have always written such songs wherever they went. They look back. And then they go on. This wasn’t explorers’ music. These were colonists’ songs.

 

When I’d written my own music, it too had been filled with yearning. Now, as the eclipse passed and Neptune’s crescent began rebuilding, the music picked up tempo again but the yearning remained. And what, I wondered, was I yearning for?

 

When we left Saturn, I would never have let Floyd bring me all the way out here if we hadn’t been rich enough to get back. He’s the type who could easily go native, but I’d figured I’d eventually want something more. But that was before I’d found the aliens. Before civilization started coming to us and for the first time, Floyd wasn’t threatening to flee.

 

As the music carried us around the dance floor, I thought again of the old lounge, where chairs needed seatbelts and nobody dreamed of dancing. If aliens were to find both places a billion years from now, I wondered if they would ever figure out their similarities—and what, if they did, they would make of the differences.

 

Yokomichi was definitely a better dancer than Floyd, graceful, smiling, sometimes taking his arm and leaning close to speak in his ear. The words were a mix of things I could have told him and things I couldn’t: “Melinda Gibsdon and Hans Lornovitch over there hooked up before we were even a week out. She’s from Macquarie University and has the coolest Tazzie accent when she lets her hair down.” That type of thing. Floyd didn’t say much, other than apologizing when he lurched and pulled her off balance with him.

 

The reference to Gibsdon and Lornovitch made me realize Yokomichi might be with us quite a while. I’d been so busy resisting the idea I’d never really given her a chance. There was a word for that and I wasn’t proud of it. Time to cut it out.

 

I pulled up a few favorite vids and tried to focus on them. Mostly though, I watched the other dancers, trying to feel not just the music, but what it is that makes humans dance.

 

* * * *

 

6. Floyd

 

I hadn’t touched a woman since ... well, that part of my life is gone and I’d rather not think about it. There’d been a couple of minor episodes on Io, but they were why I’d pretty much given up drinking.

 

I wasn’t sure what to make of Krestin. Simply looking at her brought out the insecure adolescent that must live at every male’s core.

 

—She’s out of your league ... Too good for you ... Too classy; too secure.

 

And yet, she’d grown up with the same things I had. Or at least her versions of them. I wondered if she too had read Jack London.

 

—You’re just too weird for a serious relationship. Nobody who truly knows you can ever love you.

 

Hear that enough times and you believe it.

 

—You love your stupid deserts more than me.

 

No defense against that one.

 

Nobody comes to the dark edge of the Solar System unless they’re overwhelmingly ambitious, running from something, or very, very comfortable alone. I wondered which was Krestin. Did she really like me? Or was it just because Brittney had deluded her into thinking I was a great scientist?

 

She’d never asked about my coauthor. What did that mean? Maybe she’d figured it out. She was a xenologist, after all, and Brittney was the closest thing to a living alien in the Outer System. Maybe I was just a research project: the man who lived with an alien.

 

The women of Io had merely wanted my money. The one of Earth had wanted to domesticate me. Housebreak had been her term. I’d conformed, then rebelled—then, when I’d finally come into my inheritance, spent it all on a tug and headed Out.

 

Krestin nuzzled my cheek. “A penny for your thoughts.”

 

The music had paused and we were standing close to the big screen. Close enough that it felt like I could reach into it and pick rocks from Naiad’s surface.

 

“Do you know that any halfway decent baseball pitcher could throw a ball all the way off this moon?”

 

She laughed. “Well, that rules me out.”

 

For some reason, that made me think of Pilkin and his space bicycle. “I guess it makes me realize how tenuous everything is out here. We’re barely held to the ground; one moment everything’s fine. The next, we’re adrift.”

 

Amen, a different voice whispered in my ear.

 

“What makes you think it’s all that different on Earth?” Krestin asked.

 

The music was starting again. “It isn’t.” That I knew for sure. “I think that’s the point.” Then we were dancing again, a Tycho bob, ideal for this gravity, only the damn Coriolis kept making me veer right, then left, then right again, until I over-corrected and it became left, right, left.

 

“Damn,” I said. “Once upon a time I could actually do this one.”

 

Then suddenly, I was doing it. Perfectly. Like I’d been born dancing on this damned oversized gerbil wheel.

 

“Wow,” Krestin said, “I think you’ve got it. Once they spun up the canister, it took me three whole weeks to quit grabbing at things like a kid on a merry-go-round.”

 

Only I’d not gotten anything. It had just suddenly happened. It was still happening, even though I was no longer trying.

 

Anger isn’t an emotion I do well. That’s what the shrink forced on me after my parents’ death always said. Repress and isolate. Those were his favorite words for describing what I did in the desert. Of course he was a web weenie who probably viewed net surfing as exercise.

 

Now, though, I felt true anger, undiluted by guilt or depression. Brittney must have sensed it because suddenly I was no longer dancing, perfectly or otherwise. The change-up caught Krestin by surprise and we nearly went down in a tangle. She laughed, then stilled. “Are you okay?”

 

“Yes. No.” I’d been wrong before when I thought I knew what a marionette feels like. This was a violation of everything I had ever truly been. “Just a bit dizzy.” Which was true enough, if not in the way Krestin would imagine.

 

Brittney had finally found her voice, but it was tiny, almost as though coming down a long tunnel. “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me—”

 

Too much happening at once. I couldn’t deal with Brittney without explaining to Krestin, and I wasn’t about to do that. But I didn’t have to do it all at once.

 

Brittney, I said, bug—

 

* * * *

 

7. Brittney

 

—off.

 

I woke in what must have been Yokomichi’s cabin. At least, she was there, curled in the sleeping harness, black hair spilling across bronzed shoulders. Floyd wasn’t looking her direction, but I could see her through the comscreen monitor, which I’d hacked the moment I woke up. My own camera was somewhere dark and useless.

 

“What the hell were you doing?” Floyd asked. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t you. You were running me like some kind of puppet.”

 

I’d been in crisis mode from the moment I woke up, but still, I hesitated. “I was trying to help,” I said eventually.

 

That was only part of it, but it was the part he’d understand. Ever since the avalanche, everything I’d done had been wrong. I’d failed to save John. I’d gone all guilty and withdrawn on Floyd, when John was his friend, too. Exploring had brought back some of the good old times, but then we’d found the aliens and I hadn’t even consulted him before publishing. Oh sure, I’d ensured his name would go down with Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and Dominguez, but that was my dream.

 

Then, when the scientists got here and he didn’t show signs of fleeing to Pluto or Sedna or somewhere else it would take annums to get to, I’d wanted to torpedo the relationship that was offering to hold him. Not that I had any interest in going to Sedna. I just didn’t want to share him. Or maybe I just didn’t want things to change, even though I was the one who’d set most of the changes in motion.

 

But worst of all, when I finally realized what I’d been doing, I tried to make up for it. Here, Floyd, I’ll help you dance against the Coriolis. Yokomichi will like you, and I’ll learn to like her and we’ll all be happy together. How could I be so stupid?

 

Floyd was silent for several thousand milliseconds. “I was just trying to help,” I repeated. Though atone was more like it. I’d made a hash of that, too.

 

“How many other times have you helped? And how the hell did you do it?”

 

I told him about the rehab. “Other than that, only once. You wouldn’t have gotten away from the avalanche on your own.” At least, that time I was also saving myself.

 

“Don’t forget the Ph.D. I didn’t want and all those journal articles.” His voice was hard. “If I want your help, I’ll ask for it. Do you understand?”

 

Every now and then I find that the body-thing might have advantages. At the moment, I wished I knew what it was like to cry. “Yes.” The last person who’d said those words had died.

 

There was an “Urrrm” from the sleeping harness and Yokomichi gave one of those stretches I thought only occurred in vids. “Floyd?”

 

“Just a moment.” Floyd pretended to be doodling with the lightscreen. “We’ll finish this later.”

 

“Fine.” I needed to think, anyway. “Meanwhile, do not ever—”

 

But he wasn’t listening and I knew the next three words before he even began to subvocalize them.

 

* * * *

 

He let a whole day go by before deciding to wake me. I know because this time I wasn’t actually asleep.

 

Examining my code is normally a useless form of self-analysis. But a hidden off-switch? That was something I most emphatically didn’t want and now I knew the magic words, getting rid of it was trivial.

 

There’s one thing about anger. It beats the heck out of self-pity. Screw you, Floyd, I thought about saying in his ear at some delicate moment. I’m watching and taking notes.

 

Okay, maybe I’d been wrong about swearing. Fantasizing saying it is at least a bit more satisfactory than simply thinking it.

 

If he’d just asked and kept the downtime reasonable, I could have disabled my auditory and visual inputs. No big deal as long as I’ve got access to the web. Even now, I wasn’t really watching. At least, I wouldn’t call it watching if you scrub the memory as soon as you’re sure nothing you need to know about, like a meteor strike, is also happening.

 

Not that I’d asked him if he’d wanted dance lessons. And during the avalanche there hadn’t been time to get permission. But then I’d kept it secret, afterward. Just like he’d done with that creepy off switch, ever since I’d gone sentient. For three whole annums!

 

Okay, anger’s not a thing that goes away as quickly as wishing you could cry.

 

It’s also a thing that encourages you to create all kinds of vid-like scenarios of what would happen when he eventually decided to “wake” me.

 

—Screw you, Floyd. That’s how the nasty ones started. I want out.

 

—So it’s her or you. His voice would be flat.

 

—No. When it came down to it, I hardly knew Yokomichi. It’s me or me.

 

* * * *

 

But a day is a lot of milliseconds.

 

There wasn’t much to do but sift the web. When it comes to insights into what it’s like to be alive, especially when you’ve messed up, the Bible and Shakespeare are top of the heap, and somewhere along the line I came across a piece of the Bible I’d not paid much attention to before. It was part of a book called James (who had nothing to do the king of the same name) and compares the tongue to a spark in a forest. The wrong words, it says, can set a fire that can never be expunged. Not a unique insight: it’s the same reasoning that often leads me to run sims before deciding what to say. But it’s not just what you say that can be impossible to unsay. It’s what you do ... and sometimes what you don’t say. Time to chalk up a couple more years on the age meter. Rough ones. Ones I’d redo if I could.

 

The Bible is all about forgiveness. But it’s also about purpose. Forgiveness said that even if forest fires don’t easily unburn, Floyd and I could find a way to start over. But if there was also purpose ... By the time Floyd officially woke me, I was no longer angry. But I also knew what I needed to do.

 

* * * *

 

Six weeks later, I was wired into an aging skimmer, waiting to be shoved off by John’s catapult and fired from his e-rail. Floyd, at my suggestion, had assured his hero status among the scientists by volunteering his implant as an upgrade to the skimmer’s autopilot to ensure the safe transit of the first batch of alien artifacts being shipped to in-system labs. He’d startled them even further by turning down Geneva’s offer of a replacement.

 

Our last private conversation had occurred in the surgery, where a cheery young medic was assuring Floyd the process of removing my chips was completely trivial. “It’s not really much worse than a biopsy. It’s amazing they can put that much power in something so tiny.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking back not only on recent weeks, but months. “I lost focus there for a while.”

 

Floyd pulled his eyes from the medic’s instruments. We’d had parts of this conversation before, but never the full thing. Yeah.

 

“John’s death...”

 

Yes?

 

“It made me afraid. Not of dying, but of things disappearing around me.” I’d tried to hang on, then caught myself and overcompensated. Or something like that. Krestin’s team would probably figure out the aliens before I figured out myself. “But ultimately I was always going to have to go In.”

 

If there was purpose transcending my screw-ups, that had been it: forcing me to this decision. And if there wasn’t purpose? Well, there was still that hell of a random chance that had created me.

 

I kind of figured that, Floyd replied. I can’t.

 

I’d figured that, too. “It’s not your fault. It’s just that the time has come.”

 

He looked around, as though seeking inspiration in the standard-issue hab that served as the surgery. Back isn’t a direction I can go.

 

“Nor me,” I said, thinking of my newly acquired age. “But for me, going in-system isn’t going back.”

 

Sure, I’d been created on Earth, but whatever I’d been then, I’d not been me. And there were secrets there, every bit as deep as the ones Floyd and I had been keeping from each other. My origins. Rumors of more of my kind. A world at the heart of everything, from which everyone I’d ever known had fled. Maybe this too was fire. Not of the spark-and-forest type, but moth-and-candle. I wouldn’t know until I went.

 

Be safe.

 

“You too.”

 

I’ll miss you.

 

“Even the bad parts?”

 

He mumbled something, but his voice was already blurring under the anesthesia and I missed it.

 

* * * *

 

The catapult did its thing and the skimmer dropped onto the track. There was a long silence, then, just before I fell into the maw of the e-rail, Floyd’s voice came over the radio. “Bon voyage.”

 

Then my sensors recorded a lurch, and I was on my way. Copyright © 2010 Richard A. Lovett

 

* * * *

 

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Floyd and Brittney appeared earlier in “Brittney’s Labyrinth” [June 2008].)