NOTHING EVER HAPPENS ON OBERON

 

PAUL MCAULEY

 

OBERON’S TRAFFIC CONTROL spotted the intruder in the last seconds of its approach. Something small and fast, decelerating hard, estimated terminal velocity around three hundred kph. No time to raise its crew, if it was crewed, or pinpoint exactly where it would come down—the best-guess landing ellipse covered an area of some two thousand square kilometres on the north side of Egeus Crater, one of the largest on the little pockmarked moon. There was no distress call or beacon, either, but Bai Bahar Minnot, supervisor of a scale-mining operation in Egeus, was aloft in her hopper bare minutes after the alert and soon spotted patches smashed into the endless umbrella-tree forest that covered most of the crater’s floor. A dotted line that led her straight to where the intruder had ended up.

It sat at the far end of a trough of wrecked trees: a white sphere three metres in diameter, cupped on the deflated puddles of tough airbags that had protected it during its kinetic landing. A lifepod, according to the hopper’s catalogue, an old model built some time before the Quiet War. It had thrown out a web of tethers to anchor itself in Oberon’s vestigial gravity, its systems were powered down, and its hatch was puckered open.

It looked as if the pod’s passenger had survived the crash and climbed out, but there was no sign of any movement around the pod, no one was calling on any channel, and a multispectral scan of the area failed to pick out anything in the infrared background radiated by umbrella trees around the crash site. Bai sent a quick report to traffic control, said that she was going to set down and take a look. Trying her best to sound cool and matter-of-fact, even though this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her young life. She was anxious too. The pod’s passenger could be badly injured, might need more help than she could provide. Or maybe they were an outlaw, or were in some species of serious trouble—why else would someone crash-land on this no-account backwater moon without broadcasting a distress call?

She picked out a clear spot in the tangle of broken trees, touched down with scarcely a bounce, and was reaching for the helmet of her pressure suit when someone pinged her on the common channel. Lindy Aguilar Garten, from the camp at the North Pole. She’d heard Bai’s report, she said, was on her way to the crash site with a small search and rescue party, would be there inside two hours.

“I’m already on it,” Bai said.

“You’re the daughter of Wen, Egil and Ye, aren’t you? We met at the centenary celebrations last year. You’d just turned seventeen, as I recall.”

“I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”

“Fixing some machine that’s thrown a glitch is one thing. Confronting a stranger who tried to sneak past traffic control is quite another. Your best option is to stay aloft, do a wide area grid search. If you don’t find anything, you can help us on the ground when we get there.”

“I’m already on the ground,” Bai said.

She remembered that meeting vividly. Tall and slender, dressed in a sheath the exact indigo tint of Uranus’s South Pole, Lindy had just returned from the Saturn system, where she’d spent two years studying biome construction. She hadn’t been much older than Bai—twenty, twenty-one—but she’d seemed impossibly elegant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Everything Bai yearned to be. She’d barely glanced at Bai while their parents exchanged a few pleasantries, and now here she was, muscling in, giving Bai instructions and telling her it was for her own damn good.

“If you’re worried about salvage, you can rest easy,” Lindy said. “It’s obvious that you have first claim on the lifepod.”

“I’m worried that its passenger could be hurt, or worse. And right now I’m the only person who can help them,” Bai said, and cut the channel, locked her helmet and cracked the hopper’s bubble canopy, and swung out and down.

The lifepod was empty all right, and when Bai asked her suit to handshake with its mind, hoping to find out where it had come from and who its passenger was, she discovered that it was as dead as a stone. Its systems weren’t powered down, the suit reported. They had been wiped. Purged. Nothing was left but a flicker of charge in its batteries.

Bai circled the pod, fingertip-skimming over and under splintered stems draped with crumpled canopies like fallen black sails, searching for boot prints or some other trace of the passenger, failing to find anything. Nothing moving under trees fringing either side of the smashed clearing, nothing moving anywhere in the absolute quiet stillness of vacuum.

If the pod’s passenger had for whatever reason decided to put some distance between themselves and the crash site, there was only one place within easy walking distance: a refuge that stood on the rim of a secondary crater about ten kilometres northwest. If she had crash-landed in a remote unpopulated area with no resources but a p-suit, Bai thought, and didn’t want to wait around for rescue or maybe didn’t want to be rescued, that was absolutely where she would head.

She knew she should wait for backup, but Lindy’s patronising tone had got under her skin. And anyway, it was a matter of clan pride to prove that she could find the passenger without the help of any damn Gartens. So she tuned into the refuge’s directional beacon, pulled up a map, and set off.

The silence and stillness seemed deeper under the umbrella trees. Bai was hyperalert as she ankled along, picking her way between interlocking arcs of trees, trying to keep the beacon dead ahead and searching for boot prints in crunchy dust that was everywhere littered with fallen scales, porcelain white toothy triangles the size of her helmet visor. Every so often her insulated boots kicked one at exactly the right angle and it sailed away in a long, low, frictionless arc. Every so often she disturbed a pocket of loose dust that spurted up in a waist-high geyser and settled out so slowly that if she looked around (as she increasingly did, gripped by a growing unease) she saw a diminishing row of ghostly pillars stitched along her path.

The ground rose and fell in low swales; umbrella trees thickened all around. The top layer of a vast factory that was mostly underfoot, extruded by pseudohyphal networks of nanomachines that extracted processed organic material from the rock-hard ice of the forest floor, and mined metals, rare earths and phosphates from the moon’s crust.

The stems of the trees glowed faintly in infrared and their canopies shone more brightly overhead, radiating excess heat into the chill vacuum, and the ground between them was tiger-striped with faint sunlight and pitch-black shadow. Even with her suit’s various enhancements, Bai couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred metres in any direction, but she plodded on, time ticking away, too stubborn and prideful to give up the search.

She was two kilometres from the refuge, and Lindy Garten and her crew were due to arrive in less than thirty minutes, when she was ambushed. Everything happened in a bare second. A sudden flurry of movement off to one side, something flying out from behind the broad stem of a grandmother tree, and the reflexes of Bai’s suit took over before she could react, tangling the attacker in a net a moment before the shock of impact, firing tethers that spun her in a hard stop that rattled her head inside her helmet.

The passenger flew away in the opposite direction, ricocheting off trees in headlong flight. Bai had to walk a long way, following a trail of fresh-fallen scales, before at last she spotted them. They lay unmoving, forced into a foetal ball by the net’s contraction, didn’t reply when Bai identified herself on the common band. Fearing the worst, she knelt and rolled them onto their back, and rocked back on her heels when she saw the emaciated face behind the visor of their helmet, teeth bared in a lipless grin, eyes sunk deep in sockets and taped shut.

 

 

“I THOUGHT SHE was dead,” Bai told her mother on the flight back to the scale-harvesting camp. “But then I managed to handshake with the clunky interface of her suit and found she was in cold sleep. I guess the pod assembled a suit around her after it crash-landed, and the suit tried to walk her towards the refuge. But its batteries were almost exhausted when I caught up with it, and I think its mind was damaged too. That could be why it attacked me. It didn’t understand that I’d come to help. So I disabled its motor functions and fed it just enough power to keep its life support going until the hopper arrived, and here we are, free and clear.”

There was a pause, a little under six seconds, while this zipped at light speed from Oberon to Titania, where Bai’s clan and most people in the Uranus system lived, and her mother’s reply zipped back. The two moons were presently on opposite sides of the planet, a million kilometres apart, but there was no escaping Bai’s mother, who’d pinged her as soon as she’d found out about the escapade, and not to shower her with praise and congratulations.

“You didn’t know who was in that lifepod, why it crash-landed where it did,” she said to Bai. “And you went chasing off into the forest without telling anyone what you were doing. What were you thinking? But I suppose you weren’t.”

“I was the first to arrive at the crash site,” Bai said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

Even though she knew that things could have gone very differently if her suit hadn’t been so quick and clever, she was convinced that she’d done the right thing. If she hadn’t found her when she did, the woman’s suit might have run out of power. She might have died.

But as usual Bai’s mother had other ideas, saying, “You should have waited until the Gartens arrived.”

“I didn’t need their help to find her.”

“And I suppose you think that you don’t need their help now. Even though their camp has better medical facilities.”

Yes, there was definitely a familiar edge to her voice. Bai’s mother, Wen Phoenix Minnot, was seventy-three years old, a clan elder, grand and chilly and remote. Bai was the youngest of her six children, a late addition to the family after Wen married a second husband. Lately, she seemed to be perpetually annoyed by her youngest daughter’s restlessness, which was why Bai had been packed off to supervise the scale-harvesting camp on Oberon. She wanted to live on another world? Here was her chance. A moon much like Titania, but somewhat smaller and with even fewer people. Where she could gain useful experience in field engineering. Where living in a trailer habitat in the middle of nowhere (almost everywhere on Oberon was the middle of nowhere) with only machines for company would make her realise what she was missing, back home. Where nothing ever happened.

Except that now it had.

“The Gartens would have taken all the credit,” Bai said. “Like they took the pod.”

“Whoever this woman is, she isn’t a trophy,” Wen said.

“Tell that to Lindy Garten.”

Lindy had told Bai that she’d quote unquote secured the lifepod after it had been abandoned in place. Bai was pretty sure Lindy had ratted her out to her mother too. The responsible adult dealing with the hot-headed kid’s screw-up, scoring points in the perpetual competition between clans for social superiority.

“She did the right thing, and made a full report to the peacers,” Wen said. “While you more or less kidnapped this unfortunate woman.”

“She has a name,” Bai said. “Xtina Groza. At least, that’s the name on her suit ID tag. As for the rest—why she was in that lifepod, why she came here—I guess she can tell me when she wakes up.”

Wen ignored that, saying, “I’m very disappointed in you, child. I hoped that overseeing the scale-harvesting operation would teach you something about duty, responsibility and common sense. I can see that it has done nothing of the kind. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back to the camp, to make sure that this woman gets the best treatment we can provide until the peacers arrive.”

Sure enough, a freshly printed avatar was standing at the edge of the landing pad when the hopper touched down. A hollow plastic shell in roughly human form, with feet like suction cups and claws for hands, it stepped forward and lifted Xtina Groza from the cargo rack and set off towards the trailer before Bai had finished powering down the hopper.

The trailer’s little revolving airlock could only take one person at a time. Bai went through first, and there was a moment, while she was hauling Xtina Groza’s rigid pressure suit out of the lock, when she thought of shutting the avatar outside—the thing was running semi-autonomously because of the time lag, she’d be able to do it before it could react. But she was already in more than enough trouble, so she dutifully spun the lock around and waited for the avatar to cycle through so her mother could tell her what to do next.

Wen ordered the doctor thing to extrude itself from the trailer’s wall, told Bai she had found instructions for manually opening the antique hardshell suit. The avatar stood at Bai’s back while she warmed the suit to room temperature and worked through the checklist of latches, snap fasteners and ring and plug connectors. At last, she lifted the helmet from the neck ring, removed the bulky life support pack, gloves and chestpiece, and tugged down the long zip of the inner lining.

Xtina Groza was swaddled in a yellow, close-woven, elasticated undergarment that clung to the blades and ridges of her long-limbed, painfully thin body. A hank of black hair, coarse and glossy with grease, was pulled back from her face and lay across her left shoulder; a small black disc lay between her flattened breasts. The machine that had been regulating her metabolism during cold sleep, Bai’s mother said. Old tech.

Bai unclipped the lines that had been feeding the woman drugs and nutrients, her catheter and breathing tube. Her skin was clammy but not chilled, and a faint pulse was visible under the angle of her jaw. She was no longer in true cold sleep; her suit had been trying to wake her.

The avatar carried her to the doctor thing, which immediately wrapped her from head to toe in its shroud and got to work, and Wen told Bai that she needed to take the pressure suit outside.

“It’s powered down. And in pieces.”

“It’s an old combat model,” Wen said, her voice coming from the avatar’s unmoving transparent face. “I don’t know what it’s capable of and neither do you. Go on, now.”

No point arguing, and besides, Bai had an idea. After her own suit had assembled itself around her, she piled the helmet, gloves and other loose pieces inside the shell of Xtina Groza’s suit and hauled it through the lock and whistled up a sled and rode across to the refinery, where she stuffed the suit inside an unused storage tank. Out of sight, and so on. If the peace police forgot to ask about it, and her mother forgot to remind them, Bai could try to hack into its mind, find out everything it knew about its owner. It was only a token rebellion and probably wouldn’t come to anything, but it put a little bounce in her gait as she trekked back to the trailer.

The doctor thing was still ticking away to itself as it assessed and stabilised the comatose woman. It took a while. Bai munched a sprouted bean wrap and sipped a bulb of tea, tried her best to ignore the impassive avatar. The adrenalin high of the search and rescue had drained away. She was tired and cross-grained, felt that she was being punished for doing the right thing. At least the results of the doctor thing’s analyses and diagnostic tests were worth the wait.

Xtina Groza was somatically and genetically female, apparent age around twenty-five, chronological age unknown. Trace analysis suggested that she had been in cold sleep a long time. A minimum of seventy years, maybe more. Which would have been interesting in itself, but there were also the gene mods. As well as the usual adaptations to life in low gravity, with minor variations in their genetic code that suggested Xtina Groza had been born in the Saturn system, there were mods that weren’t in any catalogue, implants in the visual cortex of her brain and her brainstem, and a mesh of fine threads woven through her musculature.

Bai and her mother agreed that the combat suit, the mods and implants, and the length of time she’d been in cold sleep strongly suggested that Xtina Groza had been involved in the Quiet War. Most Outers had taken the high road of passive resistance, but some cities and settlements had fought back against Earth’s Three Powers Alliance in the brief fierce clash, and a few pockets of rebels had actively resisted the subsequent occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems. Xtina Groza might be one such, a soldier enhanced for speed and strength and survival, and Bai had an idea, she thought a good one, which could explain how this woman had ended up in a lifepod that had only just now crash-landed on Oberon.

In the immediate aftermath of the Quiet War, a group of self-styled Free Outers had fled from the Saturn system and briefly settled on Titania (the gala where Bai had met Lindy Garten had been part of the celebrations on the hundredth anniversary of their arrival) before moving even further out. One of them, Macy Minnot, Bai’s great-grandmother, had been a defector from Greater Brazil; another had been Macy’s husband, Newton Jones, scion of an influential clan from Saturn’s moon Dione—Bai and Wen’s clan. It was possible, Bai told her mother, that Xtina Groza had been a member of the resistance, sent to recruit the Free Outers to her cause. But her ship had run into trouble, or perhaps it had been involved in a fire fight with the Three Powers expeditionary force that had come looking for the Free Outers, and she’d escaped in her lifepod and somehow it had not been picked up. Orbiting Uranus for decades in a highly eccentric path that took it far from the planet most of the time, before at last it had come close enough to Oberon to attempt a landing.

“The pod took a last chance at saving its passenger,” Bai said. “And because it didn’t realise that the war was long over, it wiped all its records in case it was captured by the enemy.”

“It’s a nice story,” Wen said. “But at the moment we don’t know enough to know if it’s anything more than that.”

“When she wakes up, we can ask her directly.”

“She isn’t going to wake up for a while,” Wen said, the time delay giving it the weight of a carefully considered reply rather than something that had already been decided without consulting Bai. “The doctor thing will keep her in an induced coma until the peacers arrive.”

Bai started to say something, forgetting in her anger about that damn delay, but her mother hadn’t finished, anticipating her objections, telling her that the woman possessed military mods, she was an unknown quantity, it wouldn’t be safe to wake her until she was in a secure place.

“She isn’t my prisoner,” Bai said, unable to help herself.

“I know you want to know everything there is to know about her. It’s only natural that you do. And you will, soon enough. Meanwhile, you’ll have to learn how to be patient. And you should get some rest. You’ve had quite the day, and you’ll need to be at your best when the peacers arrive.”

So that was that. As usual, her mother was treating her like a child, taking charge, making decisions without bothering to consult her. All she could say, in token protest, was that when the peacers came she wanted to go back with them. “You said that I needed to learn about responsibility. Well, I feel responsible for Xtina Groza because I saved her life. Making sure that she’s transported safely to Titania is the least I can do for her.”

If she turned out to be a genuine hero of the resistance, the peacers wouldn’t be able to hold the woman long. And she would need a place to stay when they let her go. Bai could invite her to stay in one of the clan’s guest apartments, help her, listen to her stories. They’d become friends, and maybe Bai could leave with her, when the time came.

She elaborated this fantasy while she drifted to sleep in the curtained niche. It was an echo of the stories she’d told herself as a child, stories about the places she’d visit and the wonders she’d see when she was old enough to travel the solar system. She hadn’t thought then that she’d end up on Oberon, where hardly anyone lived and nothing ever happened. But something had happened now, all right, and it would change everything...

When she woke, just a few hours later, the doctor thing was still humming and clicking at the other end of the trailer’s living space, Xtina Groza was still motionless under the doctor thing’s shroud, and the avatar’s soap-bubble statue was still standing guard. Except that now it was controlled by Ye, the oldest of Bai’s fathers.

“Why don’t you have some breakfast,” he said, “and tell me all about your adventure.”

Big, cuddly, endlessly patient Ye was Bai’s favourite parent. He’d always taken her plans for travelling the system seriously; he’d done plenty of travelling himself before he’d married Wen and Egil, Bai’s biological father, and settled down in Fairyland. He possessed the serene calm of someone who had seen so much of worlds that nothing could surprise him anymore, and Bai loved his stories of exotic corners of the outer system and the two years he’d spent working for the Martian Terraforming Authority. They gave her hope that one day she’d be able to see those same places and more besides. Still, she faintly resented that he was babysitting her. No doubt it was Wen’s idea. Even though telling him the story of how she’d found Xtina Groza rekindled something of the excitement and wonder of it, she felt that she was being pandered to.

“It’s definitely one for the scrolls,” Ye said, which was what he called the clan’s records. “You’re a hero, Bai. I can’t tell you how proud I am.”

“It isn’t over yet,” Bai said. “And I want to see it through to the end. Find out who she is, and the whole story of how she ended up here. And help her deal with the peacers, and help after they let her go.”

She sipped from her bulb of tea while waiting for his reply, a lot longer than the time delay.

“Mmm-hmm. We’ll have to think about that. And see what the peacers have to say about it too. Meantime, you should check the board. One of the harvesters has got itself in a pickle.”

“As if it matters now.”

“Of course it matters. You know the Gartens don’t want us here. Any violation of our lease, no matter how small, would give them an excuse to make a complaint to the Commonhold Council. You go on now, and don’t worry about your sleeping beauty. I’ll keep watch. If there’s anything to report, I’ll let you know at once.”

Bai knew it was busy work got up to distract her, but she was also sort of glad to get out for a few hours. It would give her time to think. To plan. To work out exactly how she could persuade the peacers to let her ride along with Xtina Groza to Titania.

So without any argument she suited up and headed out on one of the rackety old sleds towards the spot where the harvester had got itself into a jam. Mostly, the machines could be left to work by themselves. Several hundred man-sized, squid-shaped harvesters crawling in long transects across the forest floor, collecting scales shed by the umbrella trees and dumping their loads in the hoppers of runners that transported them to the refinery, where metals and rare earths were extracted for export and the residue was used as a substrate for starter cultures of nanomachines, which the forester rig force-injected into the rock-hard ice to quicken new colonies. Bai monitored every aspect of this activity, fixed machines that damaged themselves beyond the limits of their repair mites, organised movement of the camp to a new area of the forest when a patch had been completely harvested, and supervised the cannon that shot loaded cargo drones into low-energy transfer orbits that eventually intersected with Titania.

When she wasn’t overseeing all this, carrying out routine maintenance in the camp, or studying for her engineering certificates, she liked to hike through the umbrella-tree forest and climb to the top of the crater’s rimwall and look out at the moonscape. Her favourite route followed the narrow crest of a buttress that rose steeply to the edge of a cirque bitten into the rimwall, with a view across a smashed plain to the curved horizon, notched in the west by one of the long deep canyons that dissected the moon’s surface. Craters everywhere. So many that new craters overlapped or were inside older craters, and everything was dusted with dark red CHON tars that had spiralled in after being knocked off irregular outer moons by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts.

All around, absolute silence and stillness. No sound but the faint hiss of air in Bai’s helmet, the hum of her suit’s pumps, the flutter of her pulse in her ears. Looking out at the moonscape with her comms turned off, no boot prints on the dusty ground but her own and nothing moving under the black sky, where Uranus’s big beautiful blue globe swam like an exotic jellyfish, and at this latitude and in this season, the cold spark of the sun hung close to the horizon, and Bai felt like the queen of the little world, or the last person in the solar system. A lovely lonely feeling.

Although she’d been packed off to Oberon because her mother hoped that it would quench her restlessness, it had instead fed her hunger for travel and adventure. The Uranus system was a dull, sparsely settled backwater, and everywhere else the solar system was abloom with what people were beginning to call the Second Renaissance. Established cities and settlements in the Jupiter and Saturn systems had been rebuilt and expanded, and hundreds of new settlements and gardens had been constructed on minor planets, moons, asteroids—even on kobolds out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The great terraforming projects on Mars still had centuries to run, but more than a million people lived there in tented cities and gardens, and forests were being planted out in the lowest parts of the Hellas Basin, where the atmospheric pressure was high enough, now, for liquid water to persist on the surface. There were half a dozen different plans to terraform Venus too, and colony ships and seedships were halfway to some of the near stars and more were being constructed to sustain the outward urge.

Bai wanted to see some of that with her own eyes. She wanted to visit the clan’s Firsthome on Dione, sample life in the cities of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and the garden colonies of the asteroid belt, sail the polar lakes of Titan, take the scenic railroad down the length of Valles Marineris on Mars, maybe even visit ancient, teeming Earth. Rescuing Xtina Groza was confirmation that she wasn’t meant for an ordinary life. It was the beginning of a wonderful and strange adventure whose ending was excitingly unclear.

But first, she had to sort out the damn harvester. It had wandered into a narrow steep-sided fracture that zigzagged from a secondary crater and couldn’t work out how to retrace its steps, bumping with futile persistence against the sheer wall where the fracture terminated. A minor fault in its nav system, probably. Bai towed the machine out of the fracture and aimed it at the nearest patch of forest. She watched as it stepped away on its springy tentacles, disappeared into ink-black shadows under the umbrella trees. If it got stuck again, she’d have to bring it in and figure out what had gone wrong, but hopefully it was just a one-off glitch.

She was halfway back to the camp when an alert overflashed her comms. It was her mother, asking Bai where she was, telling her that there was a serious problem at the camp.

“We think the woman may have woken up. The avatar went offline and the feed from the doctor thing cut out. We can’t access the camp’s comms either. Which means we can’t see what’s going on, and we can’t print new avatars. We’re trying to get back up inside the comms, but it’s going to take a while. I’ve alerted the peacers. They know what to expect. They’ll go in, do what needs to be done. Meanwhile, I want you to hunker down in place. The woman has already attacked you once. She could take you hostage, or worse.”

“It was her suit that attacked me, and it was a mistake.” Bai had slowed the sled, was trying to process what she’d been told. It didn’t seem likely that Xtina Groza had woken from her induced coma. Maybe the Gartens had kidnapped her, although that would be a risky and provocative move. Or maybe one of the half hundred hermits and aesthetes scattered across Oberon had heard the chatter about her, decided she was dangerous, or that she was a messenger sent by one of their gods...

She told her mother this, said that she had to check out the camp. “If someone took her, I’ll find out who it was and where they went.”

“There was no sign of any intruder before the comms went out,” Wen said. “The peacers will be there soon. Promise me you won’t do anything silly before they arrive.”

Silly. That stung. As if she was still a little girl. As if she didn’t know what she was doing.

“I’m cutting my comms,” Bai said. “In case someone is listening in. I’ll be back shortly.”

She knew that she was being reckless, but she also knew that she had to find out what had happened, and drove the rest of the way at full speed, banging over rough ground, swerving around trees, concentrating on steering the sled so she wouldn’t have to think about everything that could go wrong.

The camp was set up on top of a bare apron of ejecta that had been thrown out from a secondary crater. Bai halted in the shadows at the edge of the forest and used the suit’s optics to scope out the lie of the land. Several runners were frozen in place around the refinery, presumably shut down when the comms had fallen over. Nothing was moving around the white cylinder of the trailer either. The spare sled was parked nearby, and the pair of hoppers stood side by side in the green glow of the lights that circled the landing apron. No sign of any intruders, but they could have come and gone, taking Xtina Groza with them...

A couple of years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, when she’d officially become an adult, Bai’s clan had given her a round trip to Miranda. One of the moon’s sightseeing attractions was a long ribbon of sheer cliffs more than five kilometres high, Verona Rupes, a big fault scarp created by upwellings of partially melted ices, and like any other tourist Bai had jumped off the end of a platform cantilevered out from one of the highest points. The gravity of Miranda was even lower than the gravity of Oberon or Titania; it took almost six minutes to reach the big target painted at the bottom. But in vacuum free fall, with no air resistance to slow acceleration, the final velocity of that long swooning fall was enough to kill a person, so jumpers were equipped with backpacks that stabilised their fall and fired braking jets during the last ten seconds. The big slam of deceleration was part of the fun.

Driving out of the shelter of the trees, Bai had the same scary floating sensation she’d felt when she’d stepped off the projection point of that jump platform into absolutely nothing at all. She parked the sled at the refinery and checked the tank in which she’d dumped Xtina Groza’s p-suit; she hadn’t been able to shake off the unsettling idea that it might have switched itself back on and reassembled itself, cut the camp’s comms, and rescued its owner. She felt a cool measure of relief when she saw that it was still there, exactly as she’d left it, and walked all the way around the trailer. No tracks she didn’t recognise, no movement behind the trailer’s lighted ports. She returned to the sled in three long bounds, had a brief conversation with her suit and stuffed a bunch of tethers in its utility pouch and unshipped a long handled wrench from the sled’s tool rack. Took a last look around and ankled up to the trailer’s lock and cycled through.

The woman, Xtina Groza, sat cross-legged on the floor at the far end of the trailer, the shroud wrapped around her like a cloak. Pale and angular, motionless as the avatar standing at the foot of the doctor thing’s couch. Moving only her eyes to look at Bai, saying, “Who are you? Where is this place?”

 

 

AFTER SETTING DOWN the wrench, moving slowly and carefully to show that she was no threat, and unlocking and lifting off her helmet, Bai introduced herself, told Xtina Groza that this was a scale-harvesting camp on Oberon, explained that she had been inside a lifepod that had crash-landed a couple of hundred kilometres to the northeast.

“I found you, brought you here. The doctor thing was treating you, and I guess you woke up.”

The woman’s gaze lost focus for a second; then she shook her head. “I don’t remember any of that. I can’t even remember my name. I try, but it’s always just out of reach.”

Her voice was soft and husky, her accent stilted in the way people in old-time clips talked.

“It’s Xtina. Xtina Groza. Or at least, that’s the tag in your suit comms.”

The woman shook her head again. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. Oberon, though... I know Oberon. It’s one of the big moons of Uranus. But how did I get to Uranus?”

“You don’t know why you’re here?”

“I don’t even remember where I came from.”

She didn’t seem upset. Mildly bemused, maybe.

“You were in cold sleep a long time,” Bai said. “I suppose it could be a side effect.”

“Cold sleep? For how long?”

Bai told her suit to disperse, and said, as its components unlocked and threw themselves to their niches beside the lock, “I’ll fetch some tea and tell you everything I know. But I’m afraid that I don’t know very much.”

They sat cross-legged on the soft red alife moss that carpeted the trailer’s floor, drinking liquorice tea (“I didn’t know I liked this,” Xtina said) while Bai explained about the lifepod’s crash-landing, how she’d found Xtina being walked through the umbrella-tree forest, asleep inside her pressure suit, how the suit had tried to ambush her.

“I think it thought I might be an enemy of yours. Or maybe it saw me as a source of power and consumables. It was walking you towards a refuge, but I don’t think it had enough zap to make it.”

“But you’re not my enemy,” Xtina said.

Bai wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question. She said, “It wasn’t you. It was your suit. You were asleep. You’d been asleep a long time. I think for around a century.”

Xtina showed no surprise. Taking a sip from her bulb of tea, she said, “Are you sure?”

Bai told her that her lifepod and p-suit were antiques, explained about the biochemical markers the doctor thing had found. Hesitated for a moment, torn between prudence and curiosity, then said, “It also found that you have implants. It seems that you were a soldier. Or some kind of combatant, anyway. Involved in the Quiet War.”

Another pause, another sip of tea. Xtina said at last, “I remember the Quiet War. I remember that the Three Powers Authority won.”

“They did, for a little while. And then we regained our independence.”

Another pause. “Well, I don’t remember that. It was a hundred years ago?”

“A little over.”

“And I came out here. To Uranus. Do you know why?”

“Have you heard of the Free Outers?”

“Is that what the people living here call themselves?”

“We came later. The Free Outers were what I guess you could call political refugees. They escaped from the Three Powers Authority during the Quiet War, stayed here a little while, moved further out.”

“You think I might be one? A Free Outer?”

“I was wondering if you came here because you wanted to join them,” Bai said.

If she’d guessed right, it would prove to her mother that her so-called fantasies could sometimes be useful.

But Xtina apologised again, saying, “I wish I could tell you it meant something to me. I wish I knew more. It’s strange. I suppose I should be confused, or upset. Or angry. Instead, it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Her bony face was hard to read, but she did seem to be amazingly calm. Stoic. If Bai had woken up with no idea of who she was, where she was or why, when she was, she would have lost her mind.

“The doctor thing gave you all kinds of drugs,” Bai said.

“Perhaps this doctor thing could give me something that would help me remember who I am.”

“Do you remember what happened when you woke up?”

“I thought I was dead. I was wrapped tight inside this blanket, no light, no sound... And when I got free of it, I had no idea where I was. Who I was.”

“So the doctor thing fell over, and then you woke up.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t remember doing anything to it?”

“Do you think I did? Because I’m a soldier?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” Bai said cautiously, pierced by a sudden sharpness in Xtina Groza’s gaze.

She was wondering if the woman was faking her amnesia. Didn’t captured soldiers refuse to give up any information but their name and rank? Maybe she was pretending to have lost her memory so that she didn’t have to reveal her mission. And she definitely wasn’t as vulnerable and confused as she seemed to be: after she’d woken from her induced coma, she’d managed to shut down the doctor thing and futz the comms, which Bai’s suit had been trying to access ever since she’d stepped into the trailer, so far without any success.

“You and me both,” Xtina said. She had finished her tea, was rhythmically squeezing the bulb in one hand, holding the shroud closed at her throat with the other. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself? Where you live and how you live. This future I’ve somehow ended up in.”

She was trying to move the conversation away from herself, but Bai went with it. The peacers would be here in little under seven hours. By then, the soporific Bai’s suit had manufactured, a little gel capsule Bai had sneaked into Xtina’s bulb of tea, should have done its work. All she had to do was keep the woman talking, keep her calm, let her know she had nothing to fear, until she fell asleep.

She explained that there were just ten thousand people in the Uranus system, most of them living on Titania. She talked about Fairyland, how the city had been built by machines before people arrived, how there were many cities and settlements like it scattered across the solar system, some still completely empty, built during the wave of expansion in the heady decades of optimism and confidence that had followed the end of the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems by the Three Powers Authority, and reconciliation between Earth and the Outers. She told Xtina about all the places she wanted to visit, and Xtina said she knew some of the names but didn’t remember if she’d ever visited them; she didn’t even remember where she’d been living before she came here.

“If you want to leave,” she said, “why not just get on a ship and go?”

“Is that what you did?”

“I know it is what young people used to do. Set out on a wanderjahr. See other worlds, meet different people. Something else I didn’t know I knew until I thought about it. You don’t do that, anymore?”

“It isn’t that easy. In my clan, everyone shares credit and karma, and everyone has a say in how we use it.”

“If you really wanted to travel to other worlds, I think you’d find a way.”

“I’m going to. I really am. I’ve already been to Miranda—that’s one of the other moons? And now I’m working here, on Oberon. It wasn’t exactly my idea, but still.”

“So it was really your clan’s idea.”

“Sort of,” Bai said. No point mentioning her mother; it would only complicate things.

“And what kind of work are you doing here, for your clan?’

“Harvesting umbrella-tree scales. I guess you don’t know what they are, umbrella trees. They were developed after the war. They’re a kind of vacuum organism.”

“I know about vacuum organisms.”

“We have a big forest of umbrella trees here. They extract metals and rare earths from the crust, store them in scales that grow on their stems. I look after the machines that harvest and process scales that the trees have shed,” Bai said, and explained that her clan maintained the umbrella-tree forest for the same reason that other clans were running a borehole project to tap the residual warmth locked in the moon’s core, or administering the little spaceport that no one but the occasional outsystem tourist used.

“We have to have a presence on Oberon if we want a say in future settlement and development. Otherwise, the Gartens, that’s the largest clan in the system, they’d claim it as their own. They’ve built a big garden at the North Pole, and now they’re roofing over a chasm in the South Pole, planning to build another garden there. They like to plan ahead,” Bai said. “In twenty years the sun will be above the South Pole, and the North Pole, where they are now, will be in darkness. This forest too. My clan are discussing whether they should start planting a new one in the south. So why I’m here, it’s just politics. A silly game.”

Her mouth was dry, and she took a sip of cold tea. She’d done most of the talking, and Xtina still didn’t look the least bit sleepy, saying that she remembered that the Uranus system was tipped at right angles to the plane of its orbit, so the north poles of the planet and its moons were pointed towards the sun for half its orbital period, the south poles for the other half.

“And it takes eighty-four years to complete one orbit,” she said. “I didn’t know I knew that until I thought about it. Isn’t that strange? I wonder what else I know. Do you have a ship here?”

“Just a couple of hoppers.”

“I mean a real ship. What about these rivals of yours? The Gartens.”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. They have to bring in construction materials they can’t make here.”

“Ships that can only travel between moons? Or ships that can travel elsewhere?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Bai felt the chasm yawning at her feet again. Xtina couldn’t possibly know about the peacer ship. Could she? And why wasn’t the soporific working? It should have put her under by now.

“You want to travel. Maybe I can help you,” Xtina said. “Take you on a wanderjahr.”

“By stealing a ship?”

“From your rivals. Why not? It would be fun. And a good way of repaying you for saving my life.”

“Even if we could, the peacers would catch us.”

“Peacers as in peace police? Don’t worry about them. I suppose you put my suit in a safe place. In case it attacked you again. I couldn’t find it in this little habitat, so it must be outside.”

Xtina had shed her benign vagueness. She was energised, fully in control of the conversation.

Bai said, “I’m not going to help you steal a ship.”

“I can take you wherever you want to go. All you have to do is fetch my pressure suit.”

Bai met Xtina’s blue gaze. “I don’t think so.”

She’d stood up to her mother many times. This was a lot harder.

“If you won’t help me,” the woman said, “maybe I’ll take your suit. See if I can remember how to fly a hopper. How hard can it be, finding the north pole of this little moon?”

“That’s enough,” someone else said.

It was the avatar.

Saying, when Bai and Xtina turned to look at it, “You locked me out, but you didn’t find the back door.”

“Who am I talking to?” Xtina said, seemingly unperturbed.

“Wen Phoenix Minnot. Bai’s mother,” the avatar said, and swivelled neatly and with one bound reached the doctor thing at the other end of the couch, snatched something from it. A needle, flashing in its gripping claw.

“Wait,” Bai said. As far as she was concerned, the comms were still down. “I can handle this.”

“I took back control only a couple of minutes ago,” Wen said, “but I heard enough to know that you can’t.”

The avatar took a bounding step towards Bai and Xtina, and Xtina pushed up and shouldered into it, grabbing the claw that held the needle and flipping up and over as they shot backwards, wrapping her legs around the avatar’s waist, twisting its head back and forth. They struck the far wall and rebounded, the avatar’s head came free with a sharp pop, trailing a short spine of gear, and Xtina kicked the rest of it away and caught a wall bracket and hung there.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” she said. “But the body remembers.”

Then she flung herself at Bai.

 

 

BAI WOKE THREE hours later, dry-mouthed and headachy. The avatar’s decapitated body sprawled on red moss a little way from her. There was no sign of its head, or of Bai’s suit. When she looked out of a port, she saw that one of the hoppers was gone, too.

The comms were still down. Truly down; Xtina had locked the back door Wen had used, the back door Bai knew nothing about. No way of raising help, or trying to warn Lindy Aguilar Garten. She fetched tea and a patch to ease the after-effects of the tranquilliser Xtina had injected into her, and waited for the peacers to arrive.

 

 

XTINA GROZA EXPERTLY finessed her disappearance. An antique but potent worm took down traffic control across the Uranus system; by the time everything was back up, the ship she’d stolen from the Gartens’ camp was long gone. It turned up twenty-one weeks later, with a fake registration and a wiped mind, on the landing field of Harper’s Hope, Europa, but there was no trace of Xtina, no clue as to why she had gone there or where she had gone afterwards.

It wasn’t even clear if Xtina Groza had ever been her real name. There were no records of her in any city or settlement in the Saturn and Jupiter systems, no familial matches to her genome in the gene libraries, and other lines of enquiry likewise dead-ended. Xtina’s pressure suit turned out to be as dumb as a bag of rocks. Bai was pretty sure that it hadn’t been walking Xtina towards that shelter, and hadn’t tried to ambush her either. No, Xtina’s implants and the mesh woven through her musculature had done all that, working her sleeping body like a puppet. As for the lifepod, it had belonged originally to a cargo ship owned by a collective in Paris, Dione, damaged in the Quiet War, and cut up in an orbital graveyard around Saturn’s moon Rhea. The lifepod had been appropriated by the Three Powers Alliance, but there was no record of what had happened to it after that, and any useful information it might have possessed was lost beyond any hope of retrieval. It hadn’t simply shut itself down—its core and subsystems had been consumed by nanites, turned to a silky powder of plastics and metals.

It was the kind of action a military AI might take if it believed that it was about to fall into enemy hands, supporting Bai’s idea that Xtina Groza had been some kind of soldier, but although Bai interviewed more than two dozen surviving members of the resistance, none of them remembered Xtina Groza, and she failed to find so much as a passing mention of a clandestine mission to Uranus in the official and unofficial histories of the war. And then there was the worm Xtina had used to futz traffic control, which turned out to be very similar to worms deployed by the Pacific Union against the transport, sewage, energy and environmental systems of several cities in the Saturn system. Outer rebels could have isolated it and redeployed it against their oppressors, but Bai knew that she had to try to chase down the other possibility.

She didn’t get very far. The reconciliation office in the PacCom’s embassy in Paris, Dione, couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions, and when she reached out directly to the Ministry of Defence in Beijing, she was told that the pertinent records were still sealed, but the case would remain active and she would be contacted if any new information came to light. As if it ever would. After all her research and patient detective work, she still didn’t know why Xtina Groza had ended up at Uranus, what she was, who she had been working for.

By then, Bai had spent two years searching for clues about Xtina’s identity, travelling amongst the moons of the Saturn and Jupiter systems, taking work wherever she could find it or relying on the kindness of strangers. She didn’t manage to wrangle trips to Mars or to Earth, but there were more than enough wonders in the asteroid belt and the Outer system, an inexhaustible variety of people. She visited Paris, Dione, and Xamba, Rhea, venerable cities with proud histories of resistance during the war and occupation, and Akti, Enceladus, which stepped down the steep, terraced side of Damascus Sulcus and gave access to the inner sea and the tweaked merpeople who lived there, claiming to be the only true inhabitants of the little moon. She made the obligatory pilgrimage to her clan’s Firsthome on Dione too, and rode a yacht across Saturn’s rings, and on Titan trekked through a range of cryovolcanoes to a spent caldera that contained an ancient garden designed by the legendary gene wizard Avernus. She worked on a kelp farm suspended in Europa’s subsurface ocean, spent half a year on Ceres helping to plant a forest around a small briny sea in a habitat that snaked along the bottom of a tented canyon, hitched a ride on a freighter that on a long swing through the asteroid belt called on the Realm of a Hundred Blooms, Ymir, Longreach, and 20897Ballard, otherwise known as Concentration City.

Some people never quit their wanderjahrs. Became nomads moving from city to city, moon to moon, world to world, taking temporary jobs or making a living as storytellers, poets, or musicians, travelling light, trading information on the wanderjahr whispernet, always thinking of the next port of call. A few wrangled places or worked their tickets on colony ships to the near stars—the ultimate wanderjahr. But after her last lead on Xtina Groza fizzled out in the warrens of Concentration City, Bai decided that her search and her desire for travelling had run their courses. She returned to Titania, and a year later married Lindy Aguilar Garten.

Her mother’s interference after the rescue of Xtina Groza was the capstone of something that had been building in Bai for a long time. When the peacers finally arrived at the scale-harvesting camp, hours too late, they’d wanted to take her back to Fairyland for questioning; instead, she’d used their comms to make the one call she was allowed by ancient right that predated settlement of the Outer system, and formally asked Lindy to give her aid and sanctuary. After a brief fierce flurry of legal exchanges, culminating in a call from Phoenix Clay Garten, chair of the Subcommittee for Public Order, the peacers capitulated, and flew Bai to the Gartens’ camp.

At first, Lindy offered to help because it would embarrass the Minot clan and strengthen the Garten’s tenuous claim on Xtina Groza, but their relationship soon deepened into something stronger and more real. Lindy gave Bai advice and support while she was interviewed and reinterviewed by the peacers, and helped her patch up a truce with her parents and the clan elders, and they stayed in touch during Bai’s wanderjahr. In the years after they married, they had two kids, both girls, and Bai went to work for the Commonhold Council, at last taking charge of the Office for Developmental Strategy. Sometimes her job took her outsystem, and as she had during her wanderjahr, she posted messages for Xtina on the public boards of the cities she visited. More out of habit than hope by then, but one day, some sixteen years later, she at last received a reply.

 

 

IT WAS IN Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Bai had a distant connection with the city. Her great-grandmother, Macy Minnot, had been part of a crew quickening a garden sponsored by the Greater Brazilian government, and had defected after discovering that it had been designed to fail, an early episode in a covert campaign to destabilise Outer cities before the Quiet War. The tent of that old garden had been shattered in the brief battle when the city had fallen to the Brazilian/European joint expeditionary force, and still lay open to vacuum, a war monument that sheltered a unique mixed ecology of vacuum organisms, alife plants, and microbes with an ammonium-based metabolism. Bai had come to Rainbow Bridge to discuss setting up something similar on the CHON-rich plains of Oberon, was resting late one evening after an early round of negotiations when someone claiming to be Xtina Groza pinged her, said they could meet at the spaceport terminal, and gave directions.

Bai sat alone for thirty minutes in a café near one of the terminal’s tall windows, with a view of the field where ships of various sizes sat on raised landing pads in the lion light of Jupiter’s fat globe. She was beginning to wonder if this was some kind of joke or trick when one of café’s antique serverbots deposited a plastic strip as it clanked past her table. Bai barely had time to read the message printed on it before it fizzed into a black puddle.

She followed her new instructions to a bench near one of the gates to the tunnels that linked the terminal to the landing pads. The woman sitting there didn’t look much like Xtina Groza—black hair, dark skin, green eyes, and about twenty centimetres shorter—but she was dressed in the plain blue suit liner mentioned in the message, and stood up as Bai approached.

“You got what you wanted,” she said. “Travelling to strange new worlds. Meeting strange new people. But then you scurried home and settled down, just like your parents, and their parents before them. What happened? Wasn’t the free life all you expected it to be? Or did you discover that you weren’t cut out for it?”

Bai supposed that this was the opening gambit of an attempt to unnerve and dominate her, but she’d dealt with enough bellicose negotiators to know that the best way to win that game was to refuse to play it. “I realised that I could use what I’d learned to make Fairyland and the rest of the Uranus system the kind of place where I wanted to live,” she said. “How about you?”

“How I live, I can’t tell you too much about that,” Xtina said. The sleeves of her suit liner were rolled back to the elbows; her forearms glittered with the kind of tattoos, abstract patterns in silver and gold and white, favoured by Europan kelp farmers. “Let’s just say it also involves a lot of travelling. It’s odd that our paths haven’t crossed before, especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

“I gave up looking for you in any serious way a long time ago. Did you ever find out who you were, and where you came from? Or are you still searching?”

Bai sat on the bench, and after a moment Xtina sat beside her, saying, “If that’s a polite way of asking if I was faking amnesia, I wasn’t.”

“I was wondering if that’s why you reached out to me after all this time. Because I may know a little about it. About who you once were.”

“Oh, so you found something, did you, back when you were playing girl detective?”

Xtina’s eyes had changed colour, but her sharp gaze was exactly as Bai remembered.

She said, “It was the worm you used when you escaped. The one that took down traffic control.”

“Wasn’t me. My implants deployed it when I stole that ship, then told me what they’d done.”

“I discovered that it was like the ones used by the Pacific Community during the Quiet War,” Bai said. “I think that you were born on Earth, with Outer traits and tweaks. You infiltrated Outer society before the war, and carried out acts of sabotage that would make invasion easier when the time came.”

Xtina shook her head. “No, that’s what the Greater Brazilian spies did. Those funny little clones. I was mostly an observer. A kind of embedded anthropologist. At least, until declaration of war.”

“Then you do remember.”

“Not exactly. My implants pointed me towards a memory cache.”

“On Europa, I suppose. Where you abandoned the ship you stole.”

“I hope that didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“Not especially.”

What was losing one ship compared to gaining you, Lindy had once said. And anyway, we got the ship back.

“The cache was hidden in one of the pumping stations that sift metals from the subsurface ocean,” Xtina said. “That’s where I was working when war broke out. It’s a ruin now. Abandoned in place after catastrophic failure. Apparently, I had something to do with that.”

“So this cache restored your memories?”

“Not exactly. It contained a kind of journal written by the person I’d once been. She set it up while she was working at the station and updated it regularly, then and afterwards. I don’t know why. She didn’t leave an explanation. Perhaps she didn’t trust her superiors. Trust isn’t something spies have in any significant quantity. Or perhaps she knew that her memory would be wiped if she was ever arrested or captured, and didn’t want to disappear. Anyway, it told me what I’d been, everything I’d done. I even found out why I’d been sent to the Uranus system.”

“You were masquerading as an Outer rebel who wanted to join the Free Outers. You planned to betray them to the Three Powers Authority, but something went wrong with your ship before you reached them, or they attacked it, damaged it.”

After she’d discovered the Pacific Community connection, Bai had worked this up as the most likely scenario.

“I don’t think it was the Free Outers,” Xtina said. “They were pacifists. Strongly opposed to every kind of violence. And I wasn’t planning to infiltrate them; I was supposed to kidnap one of them. A defector from Greater Brazil.”

“Macy Minnot.”

Xtina smiled, pleased by Bai’s shock. “I guess the solar system isn’t as big as we like to think it is.”

“She was working in Rainbow Bridge when she defected. Is that why you decided to meet me here?”

Xtina ignored that. “My mission was a covert op, got up by PacCom to further their interests. The Europeans and Brazilians weren’t told about it. After the war, the members of the Three Powers Authority mistrusted each other almost as much as they mistrusted the Outers, tried to gain advantage by espionage, secret deals, and covert ops. The one I was involved in, kidnapping Macy Minnot, was supposed to set back the Free Outers’ cause and embarrass the Greater Brazilians. Maybe the Greater Brazilians found out and tried to turn it around by sabotaging my ship, hoping I’d be captured by the Free Outers and embarrass my masters. Or maybe it was just an accident. Something happened to my ship, anyway, and I ended up in that lifepod. Luckily for you. If I’d been successful, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because you wouldn’t have been born.”

“Whatever happened back then, you aren’t responsible for it. It was someone else. And besides, the war and the occupation ended more than a century ago.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It’s what everyone thinks.”

“Maybe I’d been living amongst Outers for too long, or maybe it was brain damage caused by all those years I was in cold sleep,” Xtina said, “but I used to share some of that careless naiveté. And it almost got me killed. After I found out who I was, who I’d been, I reached out to the Pacific Community. I believed that they’d help me. Bring me home. Luckily, although I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, I had enough sense to use a cut-out, rather than contact them directly. Anyway, they replied. Told me that they’d heard that I was still alive, said that they had been looking for me. Of course, they had no intention of helping me. I was an embarrassment. Someone whose existence and actions they had always denied. I arranged a meeting, one-on-one, and the person I met with tried to kill me. I barely escaped, and I’ve been on the run ever since.”

“I’m sorry,” Bai said.

“It isn’t your fault. I was the one stupid enough to think they’d want to help an old soldier. Who didn’t work out why she had built an escape protocol into her implants until it was almost too late.”

“I might be able to help you,” Bai said. “Speak for you, make your story known to the Reconciliation Court. They could work out a deal with the Pacific Community. Or at the least give you protection.”

She meant it, although the offer was prompted as much by a sense of obligation to her younger self as to this strange woman whose life she’d saved eighteen years ago.

“The Pacific Community has been keeping watch on you. Did you know that? In case you ever got in contact with me, or stumbled over something that would point them in my direction. Before I set up this meeting, I had to deal with the person who was shadowing you in Rainbow Bridge. Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t kill her. Just knocked her out and diverted her rail capsule to the other side of Callisto. In a couple of hours she’ll wake up with a bad headache in a settlement in the middle of nowhere.”

Bai said, choosing her words carefully, feeling for the first time a distinct prickle of fear, “You took a calculated risk, meeting me. Let me follow it through. Let me put the truth out there. Once the secret is out, the Pacific Community won’t have a reason to want you dead.”

“I didn’t come here to ask you to help me. I came here to tell you what I’d found out about myself so you’d stop looking for me. So you wouldn’t, innocent and unknowing as you may be, point any more PacCom agents in my direction.”

“Did you think I might be working with them?”

“It crossed my mind. But I see now that you’re guilty of nothing more than ordinary Outer naivety. Don’t try to follow or find me. For one thing, I won’t look like this for much longer. I won’t even have the same genetic profile—I have a trait that alters the genome of my skin cells and salivary glands and blood. For another, I let you live when I took your suit. I won’t grant the same favour twice,” Xtina said, and stood up.

Bai stood too. “I’m sure that you know where I live. If you change your mind, you can always reach out to me.”

“I won’t. This is what I am. What I was born to do.” Xtina’s tone was light, but there was a hardness in her gaze. “Remember, no second chances,” she said, and turned away and walked off down the tunnel, its floating lights going out one by one as she passed beneath them until there was nothing left but darkness.

Bai waited a long time in the terminal, but none of the ships in the sector of the port serviced by that tunnel took off. Xtina Groza had gone elsewhere. Back to her clandestine life, wherever and whatever that was. Bai felt sorry for her, and sorry that she couldn’t do more. Maybe she had only imagined it, but she reckoned she’d glimpsed a glint of pain in that hard, defiant stare. Whatever Xtina had once been—spy, assassin, war criminal—she was adrift now in a future where she could find no rest. A casualty of war who was unable or unwilling to escape war’s dark gravity. Who was, perhaps, still a puppet of the escape protocols laid down by her former self.

The negotiations were protracted, but at last Bai and the representatives from the Parks Department of Rainbow Bridge worked up a satisfactory agreement to license the use of the unique ammonium-based ecology in tented gardens on Oberon’s leading hemisphere, where concentrations of CHON tars were highest, and to develop and test tweaked microbes that could be used in minimal energy tank farms to convert tars to plastics, fullerenes, and all kinds of useful organics. A small but significant step in a grand project to utilise native resources for the development and expansion of settlements on the moons of the Uranus system.

When everything was done and dusted, Bai spent five days on Europa, visiting old friends in the kelp farms, didn’t think once of trying to find the ruined pumping station where Xtina Groza claimed to have hidden her memory cache. There’d be no trace of it now, and it was quite possible it had never been there, or might never have existed. Xtina’s parting threat had been real enough, but Bai hadn’t been able to find out if someone really had been shadowing her in Rainbow Bridge, let alone whether or not they’d been ambushed, and believed that, like her kelp-farmer tattoos, Xtina’s entire story might have been an elaborate piece of misdirection. A fabrication got up to cover the gaping hole in her memory and give her a sense of purpose.

And besides all that, the unsettling, bittersweet meeting had more than satisfied Bai’s residual itch of curiosity about the woman she’d found and lost, and had spent a small but significant chunk of her life trying to find again. As everyone used to say about the war, The past is past; it’s time to look to the future. That was where Bai spent most of her time, now. Making plans to modernise Fairyland and build new settlements, steering them through the reefs of clan rivalries (fortunately, the influx of new people was increasingly undercutting the power of the clans), and finding the credit and kudos needed to implement them. The Uranus system was no longer the sleepy backwater it had once been, but there was still a lot to do. So at last Bai said goodbye to her old friends, and took the train to the spaceport and went up and out. Heading home to her wife and children, and the next challenge in her busy little life.