An ice ball under a black sky: a playground for Howard Falcon, post-human.
He rolled forward with ease. The three main camps on Makemake—Trujillo, Brown and Rabinowitz—were linked by graded roads carved into the ice, so he had no difficulty picking a smooth path away from the airlock. Quickly, Trujillo’s huddle of domes, antennae and landing pads fell away behind him. The sun was almost directly overhead, but at a distance of 39 AU—astronomical units; Makemake was thirty-nine times as far from the sun as Earth—the sun was fifteen hundred times fainter than on Earth, no more than a bright star. For a moment Falcon felt a sort of pity for the sun, that its life-giving brightness could be so easily diminished. He remembered how the sunlight had felt on the back of his neck on the observation deck of the Queen Elizabeth, with the baked and cracked landscape of the Grand Canyon below . . .
And when he looked away from the sun a vault of stars towered over him, awesome in their silence and stillness.
He had seldom been this far from home. Yet, he knew, on the true, chilling scale of the wider solar system—as defined by the Kuiper Belt, and the still more remote Oort Cloud—he had barely taken a step from Earth. And none of those stars he could see lay nearer than four light-years; most were vastly more distant than that, hundreds, thousands of times further away. The scale of things never ceased to stir his soul.
* * * *
Falcon had promised Hope that he would not stay outside for more than a few hours on this test jaunt, so at length he turned back towards Trujillo. The day here was a mere eight hours long—the sun was moving towards the horizon with almost indecent haste—and the weak shadows were already lengthening when the friendly lights of the base began to rise into view.
But now there was another light, falling from the sky: the spark of an arriving spacecraft. It settled down onto one of the landing pads in vacuum silence, using only brief bursts of thrust to control its descent. Falcon stared at it—and after a second the descending ship swelled in his vision. It would be a while before his upgraded zoom function became effortless. The pilot was doing a good enough job, he could see, although maybe a little heavy on those thruster inputs. He muttered, “Easy on the throttle, you fool . . .”
And when he looked more closely what concerned him more than indifferent piloting was the cradled-Earth logo of the World Government on the side of the spacecraft. Technically, the WG’s jurisdiction encompassed the whole solar system; in reality, it had little day-to-day need to reinforce its influence beyond Saturn. He knew of only one reason for government functionaries to come so far out.
Howard Falcon, and the Machines.
His vocation was the opening-up of worlds. Why had he ever allowed himself to get involved in murky government business?
Flattery. That was why.