Edge of Infinity

Paul McAuley





ONE DAY, MIDWAY in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon which delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help to scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.

Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. “When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?”

“Fourteen.”

“Well, then.”

Mai said, “It was as much my fault as his that we lost contact with each other.”

“But he left you in the first place. Left us.”

Shahirah had a deeply moral sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t spoken to or forgiven her own father after he and Mai had divorced.

Mai said, “Thierry left Earth; he didn’t leave me. And that isn’t the point, Shah. He wants – he wanted me to be there. He made arrangements. There is an open round-trip ticket.”

“He wanted you to feel an obligation,” Shahirah said.

“Of course I feel an obligation. It is the last thing I can do for him. And it will be a great adventure. It’s about time I had one.”

Mai was sixty-two, about the age her father had been when he’d left Earth after his wife, Mai’s mother, had died. She was a mid-level civil servant, Assistant Chief Surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. She owned a small efficiency apartment in the same building where she worked, the government ziggurat in the Wassat district of al-Iskandariyya. No serious relationship since her divorce; her daughter grown-up and married, living with her husband and two children in an arcology commune in the Atlas Mountains. Shahirah tried to talk her out of it, but Mai wanted to find out what her father had been doing, in the outer dark. To find out whether he had been happy. By unriddling the mystery of his life, she might discover something about herself. When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.

“There isn’t anything out there for people like us,” Shahirah said.

She meant ordinary people. People who had not tweaked themselves so that they could survive the effects of microgravity and harsh radiation, and endure life in claustrophobic habitats scattered across frozen, airless moons.

“Thierry thought there might be,” Mai said. “I want to find out what it was.”

She took compassionate leave, flew from al-Iskandariyya to Port Africa, Entebbe, and was placed in deep, artificial sleep at the passenger processing facility. Cradled inside a hibernaculum, she rode up the elevator to the transfer station and was loaded onto a drop ship, and forty-three days later woke in the port of Paris, Dione. After two days spent recovering from her long sleep and learning how to use a pressure suit and move around in Dione’s vestigial gravity, she climbed aboard a taxi that flew in a swift suborbital lob through the night to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, her father’s last home, the place where he died.

The taxi’s cabin was an angular bubble scarcely bigger than a coffin, pieced together from diamond composite and a cobweb of fullerene struts, and mounted on a motor stage with three spidery legs. Mai, braced beside the pilot in a taut crash web, felt that she was falling down an endless slope, as in one of those dreams where you wake with a shock just before you hit ground. Saturn’s swollen globe, subtly banded with pastel shades of yellow and brown, swung overhead and sank behind them. The pilot, a garrulous young woman, asked all kinds of questions about life on Earth, pointed out landmark craters and ridges in the dark moonscape, the line of the equatorial railway, the homely sparks of oases, habitats, and tent towns. Mai couldn’t quite reconcile the territory with the maps in her p-suit’s library, was startled when the taxi abruptly slewed around and fired its motor and decelerated with a rattling roar and drifted down to a kind of pad or platform set at the edge of an industrial landscape.

The person who met her wasn’t the man with whom she’d discussed her father’s death and her travel arrangements, but a woman, her father’s former partner, Lexi Truex. They climbed into a slab-sided vehicle slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, and drove out along a broad highway past blockhouses, bunkers, hangars, storage tanks, and arrays of satellite dishes and transmission towers: a military complex dating from the Quiet War, according to Lexi Truex.

“Abandoned in place, as they say. We don’t have any use for it, but never got around to demolishing it, either. So here it sits.”

Lexi Truex was at least twenty years younger than Mai, tall and pale, hair shaven high either side of a stiff crest of straw-coloured hair. Her pressure suit was decorated with an intricate, interlocking puzzle of green and red vines. She and Thierry had been together for three years, she said. They’d met on Ceres, while she had been working as a freetrader.

“That’s where he was living when I last talked to him,” Mai said. It felt like a confession of weakness. This brisk, confident woman seemed to have more of a claim on her father than she did.

“He followed me to Dione, moved in with me while I was still living in the old habitat,” Lexi Truex said. “That’s where he got into ceramics. And then, well, he became more and more obsessed with his work, and I wasn’t there a lot of the time...”

Mai said that she’d done a little research, had discovered that her father had become a potter, and had seen some of his pieces.

“You can see plenty more, at the habitat,” Lexi said. “He worked hard at it, and he had a good reputation. Plenty of kudos.”

It turned out that Lexi Truex didn’t know that on Earth, in al-Iskandariyya, Thierry had cast bronze amulets using the lost wax method and sold them to shops that catered for the high-end tourist market. Falcons, cats, lions. Gods with the heads of crocodiles or jackals. Sphinxes. Mai told Lexi that she’d helped him polish the amulets with slurried chalk paste and jewellers’ rouge, and create patinas with cupric nitrate. She had a clear memory of her father hunched over a bench, using a tiny knife to free the shape of a hawk from a small block of black wax.

“He didn’t ever talk about his life before he went up and out,” Lexi said. “Well, he mentioned you. We all knew he had a daughter, but that was about it.”

They discussed Thierry’s last wishes. Lexi said that in the last few years he’d given up his work, had taken to walking the land. She supposed that he wanted them to scatter his ashes in a favourite spot. He’d been very specific that it should take place at sunrise, but the location was a mystery.

“All I know is that we follow the railway east, and then we follow his mule,” Lexi said. “Might involve some cross-country hiking. Think you can manage it?”

“Walking is easier than I thought it would be,” Mai said.

When she was young, she’d liked to wade out into the sea as deep as she dared and stand on tip-toe, water up to her chin, and let the waves push her backwards and forward. Walking in Dione’s vestigial gravity, one-sixtieth the gravity of Earth, was a little like that. Another memory of her father: watching him make huge sand sculptures of flowers and animals on the beach. His strong fingers, his bare brown shoulders, the thatch of white hair on his chest, his total absorption in his task.

They had left the military clutter behind, were driving across a dusty plain lightly spattered with small shallow craters. Blocks and boulders as big as houses squatting on smashed footings. A fan of debris stretching from a long elliptical dent. A line of rounded hills rising to the south: the flanks of the wall of a crater thirty kilometres in diameter, according to Lexi. Everything faintly lit by Saturnshine; everything the colour of ancient ivory. It reminded Mai of old photographs, Europeans in antique costumes stiffly posed amongst excavated tombs, she’d seen in the museum in al-Qahira.

Soon, short steep ridges pushed up from the plain, nested curves thirty or forty metres high like frozen dunes, faceted here and there by cliffs rearing above fans of slumped debris. The cliffs, Mai saw, were carved with intricate frescoes, and the crests of the ridges had been sculpted into fairytale castles or statues of animals. A pod of dolphins emerging from a swell of ice; another swell shaped like a breaking wave with galloping horses rearing from frozen spume; an eagle taking flight; a line of elephants walking trunk to tail, skylighted against the black vacuum. The last reminding her of one of her father’s bronze pieces. Here was a bluff shaped into the head of a Buddha; here was an outcrop on which a small army equipped with swords and shields were frozen in battle.

It was an old tradition, Lexi Truex said. Every Christmas, gangs from her clan’s habitat and neighbouring settlements congregated in a temporary city of tents and domes and ate osechi-ryo-ri and made traditional toasts in saki, vodka, and whisky, played music, danced, and flirted, and worked on new frescoes and statues using drills and explosives and chisels.

“We like our holidays. Kwanzaa, Eid ul-Fitr, Chanukah, Diwali, Christmas, Newtonmass... Any excuse for a gathering, a party. Your father led our gang every Christmas for ten years. The whale and the squid, along the ridge there? That’s one of his designs.”

“And the elephants?”

“Those too. Let me show you something,” Lexi said, and drove the rolligon down the shallow slope of the embankment onto the actual surface of Dione.

It wallowed along like a boat in a choppy sea, its six fat tyres raising rooster-tails of dust. Tracks ribboned everywhere, printed a year or a century ago. There was no wind here. No rain. Just a constant faint infalling of meteoritic dust, and microscopic ice particles from the geysers of Enceladus. Everything unchanging under the weak glare of the sun and the black sky, like a stage in an abandoned theatre. Mai began to understand the strangeness of this little world. A frozen ocean wrapped around a rocky core, shaped by catastrophes that predated life on Earth. A stark geology empty of any human meaning. Hence the sculptures, she supposed. An attempt to humanise the inhuman.

“It’s something one of my ancestors made,” Lexi said, when Mai asked where they were going. “Macy Minnot. You ever heard of Macy Minnot?”

She had been from Earth. Sent out by Greater Brazil to work on a construction project in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, she’d become embroiled in a political scandal and had been forced to claim refugee status. This was before the Quiet War, or during the beginning of it (it had been the kind of slow, creeping conflict that has no clear beginning, erupting into combat only at its very end), and Macy Minnot had ended up living with the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. Trying her best to assimilate, to come to terms with her exile.

As they drove around the end of a ridge, past a tumble of ice boulders carved into human figures, some caught up in a whirling dance, others eagerly pushing their way out of granitic ice, Lexi explained that one Christmas after the end of the Quiet War, her last Christmas on Dione, Macy Minnot had come up with an idea for her own sculpture, and borrowed one of the big construction machines and filled its hopper with a mix of ice dust and a thixotropic, low-temperature plastic.

“It’s too cold for ice crystals to melt under pressure and bind together,” Lexi said. “The plastic was a binding agent, malleable at first, gradually hardening off. So you could pack the dust into any shape. You understand?”

“I’ve seen snow, once.”

It had been in the European Union, the Alps: a conference on security of shipping ports. Mai, freshly divorced, had taken her daughter, then a toddler. She remembered Shahirah’s delight in the snow. The whole world transformed into a soft white playground.

“There’s always a big party, the night before the beginning of the competition. Macy and her partner got wasted, and they started up their construction machine. Either they intended to surprise everyone, or they decided they couldn’t wait. Anyway, they forgot to include any stop or override command in the instruction set they’d written. So the machine just kept going,” Lexi said, and steered the rolligon through of a slant of deep shadow and swung it broadside, drifting to a stop at the edge of a short steep drop.

They were at the far side of the little flock of ridges. The rumpled dented plain stretched away under the black sky, and little figures marched across it in a straight line.

Mai laughed. The shock of it. The madly wonderful absurdity.

“They used fullerene to make the arms and eyes and teeth,” Lexi said. “The scarves are fullerene mesh. The noses are carrots. The buttons are diamond chips.”

There were twenty, thirty, forty of them. Each two metres tall, composed of three spheres of descending size stacked one on top of the other. Pure white. Spaced at equal intervals. Black smiles and black stares, vivid orange noses. Scarves rippling in an impalpable breeze. Marching away like an exercise in perspective, dwindling over the horizon...

“Thierry loved this place,” Lexi said. “He often came out here to meditate.”

They sat and looked out at the line of snowmen for a long time. At last, Lexi started the rolligon and they drove around the end of the ridges and rejoined the road and drove on to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.


IT WAS A simple dome that squatted inside the rimwall of a circular crater. A forest ran around its inner circumference; lawns and formal flowerbeds circled a central building patchworked from a dozen architectural styles, blended into each other like a coral reef. Mai’s reception reminded her of the first time she’d arrived at her daughter’s arcology: adults introducing themselves one by one, excited children bouncing around, bombarding her with questions. Was the sky really blue on Earth? What held it up? Were there really wild animals that ate people?

There was a big, informal meal, a kind of picnic in a wide grassy glade in the forest, where most of the clan seemed to live. Walkways and ziplines and nets were strung between sweet chestnuts and oaks and beech trees; ring platforms were bolted around the trunks of the largest trees; pods hung from branches like the nests of weaver birds.

Mai’s hosts told her that most of the clan lived elsewhere, these days. Paris. A big vacuum-organism farm on Rhea. Mars. Titan. A group out at Neptune, living in a place Macy Minnot and her partner helped build after they fled the Saturn system at the beginning of the Quiet War. The habitat was becoming more and more like a museum, people said. A repository of souvenirs from the clan’s storied past.

Thierry’s workshop was already part of that history. Two brick kilns, a paved square under a slant of canvas to keep off the rain occasionally produced by the dome’s climate control machinery. A potter’s wheel with a saddle-shaped stool. A scarred table. Tools and brushes lying where he’d left them. Neatly labelled tubs of clay slip, clay balls, glazes. A clay-stained sink under a standpipe. Lexi told Mai that Thierry had mined the clay from an old impact site. Primordial stuff billions of years old, refined to remove tars and other organic material.

Finished pieces were displayed on a rack of shelves. Dishes in crescent shapes glazed with black and white arcs representing segments of Saturn’s rings. Bowls shaped like craters. Squarish plates stamped with the surface features of tracts of Dione and other moons. Craters, ridges, cliffs. Plates with spattered black shapes on a white ground, like the borderland between Iapetus’s dark and light halves. Vases shaped like shepherd moons. A scattering of irregular chunks in thick white glaze – pieces of the rings. A glazed tan ribbon with snowmen lined along it...

It was so very different from the tourist stuff Thierry had made, yet recognisably his. And highly collectible, according to Lexi. Unlike most artists in the outer system, Thierry hadn’t trawled for sponsorship and subscriptions, made pieces to order, or given access to every stage of his work. He had not believed in the democratisation of the creative process. He had not been open to input. His work had been very private, very personal. He hadn’t liked to talk about it, Lexi said. He hadn’t let anyone get close to that part of him. This secrecy had eventually driven them apart, but it had also contributed to his reputation. People were intrigued by his work, by his response to the moonscapes of the Saturn system, his outsider’s perspective, because he refused to explain it. He’d earned large amounts of credit and kudos – tradeable reputation – from sale of his ceramics, but had spent hardly any of it. The work was enough, as far as he’d been concerned. Mai, remembering the sand sculptures, thought she understood a little of this. She asked if he’d been happy, but no one seemed able to answer the question.

“He seemed to be happy, when he was working,” the habitat’s patriarch, Rory Jones, said.

“He didn’t talk much,” someone else said.

“He liked to be alone,” Lexi said. “I don’t mean he was selfish. Well, maybe he was. But he mostly lived inside his head.”

“He made this place his home,” Rory Jones said, “and we were happy to have him living here.”

The habitat’s chandelier lights had dimmed to a twilight glow. Most of the children had wandered off to bed; so had many of the adults. Those left sat around a campfire on a hearth of meteoritic stone, passing around a flask of honeysuckle wine, telling Mai stories about her father’s life on Dione.

He had walked around Dione one year. A journey of some seven thousand kilometres. Carrying a bare minimum of consumables, walking from shelter to shelter, settlement to settlement. Staying in a settlement for a day or ten days or twenty before moving on. Walking the world was much more than exploring or understanding it, Mai’s hosts told her. It was a way of recreating it. Of making it real. Of binding yourself to it. Not every outer walked around their world, but those who did were considered virtuous, and her father was one such.

“Most visitors only see the parts they know about,” a woman told Mai. “The famous views, the famous shrines and oases. A fair few come to climb the ice cliffs of Padua Chasmata. And they are spectacular climbs. Four or five kilometres. Huge views when you top out. But we prefer our own routes, on ridges or rimwalls you’d hardly notice, flying over them. There’s a very gnarly climb close by, in a small crater the military used as a trash dump in the Quiet War. The achievement isn’t the view, but testing yourself against your limits. Your father understood that. He was no ring runner.”

This led into another story. It seemed that there was a traditional race around the equator of another of Saturn’s moons, Mimas. It was held every four years: even taking part in it was a great honour. Shortly after the end of the Quiet War, a famous athlete, Sony Shoemaker, had come to Mimas, determined to win it. She had trained on Earth’s Moon for a year, had bought a custom-made p-suit from one of the best suit tailors in Camelot. Like all the other competitors, she had qualified by completing a course around the peak in the centre of the rimwall of Arthur crater within a hundred and twenty hours. Fifty days later she set out, ranked last in a field of thirty-eight.

Mimas was a small moon, about a third the size of Dione. A straight route around its equator would be roughly two and a half thousand kilometres long, but there was no straight route. Unlike Dione, Mimas had never been resurfaced by ancient floods of water-ice lava. Its surface was primordial, pockmarked, riven. Craters overlapping craters. Craters inside craters. Craters strung along rimwalls of larger craters. And the equatorial route crossed Herschel, the largest crater of all, a hundred and thirty kilometres across, a third of the diameter of Mimas, its steep rimwalls kilometres tall, its floor shattered by blocky, chaotic terrain.

The race was as much a test of skill in reading and understanding the landscape as of endurance. Competitors were allowed to choose their own route and set out caches of supplies, but could only use public shelters, and were disqualified if they called for help. Some died rather than fail. Sony Shoemaker did not fail, and astonished aficionados by coming fourth. She stayed on Mimas, afterwards. She trained. Four years later she won, beating the reigning champion, Diamond Jack Dupree.

He did not take his defeat lightly. He challenged Sony Shoemaker to another race. A unique race, never before attempted. A race around a segment of Saturn’s rings.

Although the main rings are seventy-three thousand kilometres across, a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon, they average just ten metres in thickness, but oscillations propagating across the dense lanes of the B ring pile up material at its outer edge, creating peaks a kilometre high. Diamond Jack Dupree challenged Sony Shoemaker to race across one of these evanescent mountains.

The race did not involve anything remotely resembling running, but it was muscle powered, using highly-modified p-suits equipped with broad wings of alife material with contractile pseudo-musculatures and enough area to push, faintly, lightly, against ice pebbles embedded in a fragile lace of ice gravel and ice dust. Cloud swimming. A delicate rippling controlled by fingers and toes that would slowly build up momentum. The outcome determined not by speed or strength, because if you went too fast you’d either sheer away from the ephemeral surface or plough under it, but by skill and judgement and patience.

Sony Shoemaker did not have to accept Diamond Jack Dupree’s challenge. She had already proved herself. But the novelty of it, the audacity, intrigued her. And so, a year to the day after her victory on Mimas, after six months hard training in water tanks and on the surface of the dusty egg of Methone, one of Saturn’s smallest moons, Sony Shoemaker and Diamond Jack Dupree set off in their manta-ray p-suits, swimming across the peaks and troughs of a mountainous, icy cloud at the edge of the B ring.

It was the midsummer equinox. The orbits of Saturn and his rings and moons were aligned with the sun; the mountains cast ragged shadows across the surface of the B ring; the two competitors were tiny dark arrowheads rippling across a luminous slope. Moving very slowly, almost imperceptibly, to begin with. Gradually gaining momentum, skimming along at ten and then twenty kilometres an hour.

There was no clear surface. The ice-particle mountains emitted jets and curls of dust and vapour. There were currents and convection cells. It was like trying to swim across the flank of a sandstorm.

Sony Shoemaker was the first to sink. Some hundred and thirty kilometres out, she moved too fast, lost contact with a downslope, and plunged through ice at the bottom and was caught in a current that subducted her deep into the interior. She was forced to use the jets of her p-suit to escape, and was retrieved by her support ship. Diamond Jack Dupree wallowed on for a short distance, and then he too sank. And never reappeared.

His p-suit beacon cut off when he submerged, and although the support ships swept the mountain with radar and microwaves for several days, no trace of him was ever found. He had vanished, but there were rumours that he was not dead. That he had dived into a camouflaged lifepod he’d planted on the route, slept out the rescue attempts, and gone on the drift or joined a group of homesteaders, satisfied that he had regained his honour.

There had been other races held on the ring mountains, but no one had ever beaten Diamond Jack Dupree’s record of one hundred and forty-three kilometres. No one wanted to. Not even Sony Shoemaker.

“That’s when she crossed the line,” Rory Jones told Mai. “Winning the race around Mimas didn’t make her one of us. But respecting Diamond Jack Dupree’s move, that was it. Your father crossed that line, too. He knew.”

“Because he walked around the world,” Mai said. She was trying to understand. It was important to them, and it seemed important to them that she understood.

“Because he knew what it meant,” Rory said.

“One of us,” someone said, and all the outers laughed.

Tall skinny pale ghosts, jackknifed on stools or sitting cross-legged on cushions. All elbows and knees. Their faces angular masks in the firelight flicker. Mai felt a moment of irreality. As if she was an intruder on someone else’s dream. She was still very far from accepting this strange world, these strange people. She was a tourist in their lives, in the place her father had made his home.

She said, “What does it mean, go on the drift? Is it like your wanderjahrs?”

She’d discovered that custom when she’d done some background research. After reaching majority, young outers often set out on extended and mostly unplanned tours of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Working odd jobs, experiencing all kinds of cultures and meeting all kinds of people before at last returning home and settling down.

“Not exactly,” Lexi said. “You can come home from a wanderjahr. But when you go on the drift, that’s where you live.”

“In your skin, with whatever you can carry and no more,” Rory said.

“In your p-suit,” someone said.

“That’s what I said,” Rory said.

“And homesteaders?” Mai said.

Lexi said, “That’s when you move up and out to somewhere no one else lives, and make a life there. The solar system out to Saturn is industrialised, more or less. More and more people want to move away from all that, get back to what we once were.”

“Out to Uranus,” someone said.

“Neptune,” someone else said.

“There are homesteaders all over the Centaurs now,” Rory said. “You know the Centaurs, Mai? Primordial planetoids that orbit between Saturn and Neptune. The source of many short-term comets.”

“Macy Minnot and her friends settled one, during the Quiet War,” Lexi said. “It was only a temporary home, for them, but for many it’s become permanent.”

“Even the scattered disc is getting crowded now, according to some people,” Rory said.

“Planetoids like the Centaurs,” Lexi told Mai, “with long, slow orbits that take them inward as far as Neptune, and out past Pluto, past the far edge of the Kuiper belt.”

“The first one, Fiddler’s Green, was settled by mistake,” Rory said.

“It’s a legend,” a young woman said.

“I once met someone who knew someone who saw it, once,” Ray said. “Passed within a couple of million kilometres and spotted a chlorophyll signature, but didn’t stop because they were on their way to somewhere else.”

“The very definition of a legend,” the woman said.

“It was a shipwreck,” Rory told Mai. “Castaways on a desert island. I’m sure it still happens on the high seas of Earth.”

“There are still shipwrecks,” Mai said. “Although everything is connected to everything else, so anyone who survives is likely to be found quickly.”

“The outer dark beyond Neptune is still largely uninhabited,” Rory said. “We haven’t yet finished cataloguing everything in the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disk, and everything is most definitely not connected to everything else, out there. How the story goes, when the Quiet War heated up, a ship from the Jupiter system was hit by a drone as it approached Saturn. Its motors were badly damaged and it ploughed through the Saturn system and kept going. It couldn’t decelerate, couldn’t reach anywhere useful. Its crew and passengers went into hibernation. Sixty or seventy years later, those still alive woke up. They were approaching a planetoid somewhat beyond the orbit of Pluto, had just enough reaction mass to match orbits with it.

“The ship was carrying construction machinery. The survivors used the raw tars and clays of the planetoid to build a habitat. A small bubble of air and light and heat, spun up to give a little gravity, farms and gardens on the inside, vacuum organisms growing on the outside, like the floating worldlets in the Belt. They called it Fiddler’s Green, after an old legend from Earth about a verdant and uncharted island sometimes encountered by becalmed sailors. Perhaps you know it, Mai.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“They built a garden,” the young woman said, “but they didn’t ever try to call for help. How likely is that?”

Rory said, “Perhaps they didn’t call for help because they believed the Three Powers were still controlling the systems of Saturn and Jupiter. Or perhaps they were happy, living where they did. They didn’t need help. They didn’t want to go home because Fiddler’s Green was their home. The planetoid supplied all the raw material they required. The ship’s fusion generator gave them power, heat and light. They are still out there, travelling beyond the Kuiper belt. Living in houses woven from branches and leaves. Farming. Falling in love, raising families, dying. A world entire.”

“A romance of regression,” the young woman said.

“Perhaps it is no more than a fairytale,” Rory said. “But nothing in it is impossible. There are hundreds of places like Fiddler’s Green. Thousands. It’s just an outlier, an extreme example of how far people are prepared to go to make their own world, their own way of living.”

The outers talked about that. Mai told about her life in al-Iskandariyya, her childhood, her father’s work, her work in the Department of Antiquities, the project she’d recently seen to completion, the excavation of a twenty-first century shopping mall that had been buried in a sandstorm during the Overturn. At last there was a general agreement that they should sleep. The outers retired to hammocks or cocoons; Mai made her bed on the ground, under the spreading branches of a grandfather oak, uneasy and troubled, aware as she had not been, in her cubicle in the port hostel, of the freezing vacuum beyond the dome’s high transparent roof. It was night inside the dome, and night outside, too. Stars shining hard and cold beyond the black shadows of the trees.

Everything that seemed natural here – the ring forest, the lawns, the dense patches of vegetables and herbs – was artificial. Fragile. Vulnerable. Mai tried and failed to imagine living in a little bubble so far from the sun that it was no more than the brightest star in the sky. She fretted about the task that lay ahead, the trek to the secret place where she and Lexi Truex would scatter Thierry’s ashes.

At last sleep claimed her, and she dreamed of hanging over the Nile and its patchwork borders of cotton fields, rice fields, orchards and villages, everything falling away, dwindling into tawny desert as she fell into the endless well of the sky...


IT WAS A silly anxiety dream, but it stayed with Mai as she and Lexi Truex drove north to a station on the railway that girdled Dione’s equator, and boarded the diamond bullet of a railcar and sped out across the battered plain. They were accompanied by Thierry’s mule, Archie. A sturdy robot porter that, with its flat loadbed, small front-mounted sensor turret, and three pairs of articulated legs, somewhat resembled a giant cockroach. Archie carried spare airpacks and a spray pistol device, and refused to tell Mai and Lexi their final destination, or why it was important that they reach it before sunrise. Everything would become clear when they arrived, it said.

According to Lexi, the pistol used pressurised water vapour from flash-heated ice to spray material from pouches plugged into its ports, such as the pouch of gritty powder, the residue left from resomation of Thierry’s body, or the particles of thixotropic plastic in a pouch already plugged into the pistol. The same kind of plastic Macy Minnot and her partner had used to shape ice dust into snowmen.

“We’re going to spray-paint something with the old man’s ashes,” Lexi said. “That much is clear. The question is, what’s the target?”

Archie refused to answer her in several polite ways.

The railcar drove eastward through the night. Like almost all of Saturn’s moons, like Earth’s Moon, Dione’s orbital period, some sixty-six hours, was exactly equal to the time it took to complete a single rotation on its axis, so that one side permanently faced Saturn. Its night was longer than an entire day, on Earth.

Saturn’s huge bright crescent sank westward as the train crossed a plain churned and stamped with craters. Every so often, Mai spotted the fugitive gleam of the dome or angular tent of a settlement. A geometric fragment of chlorophyll green gleaming in the moonscape’s frozen battlefield. A scatter of bright lights in a small crater. Patchworked fields of black vacuum organisms spread across tablelands and slopes, plantations of what looked like giant sunflowers standing up along ridges, all of them facing east, waiting for the sun.

The elevated railway shot out across a long and slender bridge that crossed the trough of Eurotas Chasmata, passing over broad slumps of ice that descended into a river of fathomless shadow. The far side was fretted with lesser canyons and low bright cliffs rising stepwise with broad benches between. The railway turned north to follow a long pass that cut between high cliffs, bent eastwards again. At last, a long ridge rolled up from the horizon: the southern flanks of the rimwall of Amata crater.

The railcar slowed, passed through a short tunnel cut through a ridge, ran through pitch-black shadow beyond and out into Saturnshine, and sidled into a station cantilevered above a slope. Below, a chequerboard of scablike vacuum organisms stretched towards the horizon. Above, the dusty slope, spattered with small, sharp craters, rose to a gently scalloped edge, stark against the black sky.

Several rolligons were parked in the garage under the station. Following Archie’s instructions, Lexi and Mai climbed into one of the vehicles (Archie sprang onto the flat roof) and drove along a track that slanted towards the top of the slope. After five kilometres, the track topped out on a broad bench, swung around a shelter, a stubby cylinder jutting under a heap of fresh white ice blocks, a way point for hikers and climbers on their way into the interior of the huge crater, and followed the curve of the bench eastward until it was interrupted by a string of small craters twenty or thirty metres across.

Lexi and Mai climbed out and Lexi rechecked Mai’s p-suit and they followed Archie around the smashed bowls of the craters. There were many bootprints trampled into the dust. Thierry’s prints, coming and going. Mai tried not to step on them. Strange to think they might last for millions of years.

“It is not far,” Archie said, responding to Lexi’s impatient questions. “It is not far.”

Mai felt a growing glee as she loped along, felt that she could bounce away like the children in the habitat, leap over ridges, cross craters in a single bound, span this little world in giant footsteps. She’d felt like this when her first grandchild had been born. Floating on a floodtide of happiness and relief. Free of responsibility. Liberated from the biological imperative.

Now and then her pressure suit beeped a warning; once, when she exceeded some inbuilt safety parameter, it took over and slowed her headlong bounding gait and brought her to a halt, swaying at the dust-softened rim of a small crater. Reminding her that she was dependent on the insulation and integrity of her own personal space ship, its native intelligence, the whisper of oxygen in her helmet.

On the far side of the crater, cased in her extravagantly decorated p-suit, Lexi turned with a bouncing step, asked Mai if she was okay.

“I’m fine!”

“You’re doing really well,” Lexi said, and asked Archie for the fifth or tenth time if they were nearly there.

“It is not far.”

Lexi waited as Mai skirted the rim of the crater with the bobbing shuffle she’d been taught, and they went on. Mai was hyperaware of every little detail in the moonscape, everything fresh and strange and new. The faint flare of Saturnshine on her helmet visor. The rolling blanket of gritty dust, dimpled with tiny impacts. Rayed scatterings of sharp bright fragments. A blocky ice-boulder as big as a house perched in a scatter of debris. The gentle rise and fall of the ridge, stretching away under the black sky where untwinkling stars showed everywhere. Saturn’s crescent looming above the western horizon. The silence and stillness of the land. The stark reality of it.

She imagined her father walking here, under this same sky. Alone in a moonscape where no trace of human activity could be seen.

The last and largest crater was enclosed by ramparts of crooked ice blocks three stories high and cemented with a silting of dust. Archie didn’t hesitate, climbing a crude stairway hacked into the ice and plunging through a ragged cleft. Lexi and Mai followed, and the crater’s bowl opened below them, tilted towards the plain beyond the curve of the ridge. The spark of the sun stood just above the horizon. An arc of light defined the far edge of the moonscape; sunlight lit a segment of the crater’s floor, where boulders lay tumbled amongst a maze of bootprints and drag marks.

“At least we got the timing right,” Lexi said.

“What are we supposed to be seeing?” Mai said.

Lexi asked Archie the same question.

“It will soon become apparent.”

They stood side by side, Lexi and Mai, wavering in the faint grip of gravity. The sunlit half of the crater directly in front of them, the dark half beyond, shadows shrinking back as the sun slowly crept into the sky. And then they saw the first shapes emerging.

Columns, or tall vases. Cylindrical, woman-sized or larger. Different heights, in no apparent order. Each one shaped from translucent ice tinted with pastel shades of pink and purple, and threaded with networks of darker veins.

Lexi stepped down the shattered blocks of the inner slope and moved across the floor. Mai followed.

The nearest vases were twice their height. Lexi reached out to one of them, brushed the fingertips of her gloved hand across the surface.

“These have been hand-carved,” she said. “You can see the tool marks.”

“Carved from what?”

“Boulders, I guess. He must have carried the ice chips out of here.”

They were both speaking softly, reluctant to disturb the quiet of this place. Lexi said that the spectral signature of the ice corresponded with artificial photosynthetic pigments. She leaned close, her visor almost kissing the bulge of the vase, reported that it was doped with microscopic vacuum organisms.

“There are structures in here, too,” she said. “Long fine wires. Flecks of circuitry.”

“Listen,” Mai said.

“What?”

“Can’t you hear it?”

It was a kind of interference on the common band Mai and Lexi were using to talk. Faint and broken. Hesitant. Scraps of pure tones rising and fading, rising again.

“I hear it,” Lexi said.

The sound grew in strength as more and more vases emerged into sunlight. Long notes blending into a polyphonic harmony.

The microscopic vacuum organisms were soaking up sunlight, Lexi said, after a while. Turning light into electricity, powering something that responded to changes in the structure of the ice. Strain gauges perhaps, coupled to transmitters.

“The sunlight warms the ice, ever so slightly,” she said. “It expands asymmetrically, the embedded circuitry responds to the microscopic stresses . . .”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes...”

It was beautiful. A wild, aleatory chorus rising and falling in endless circles above the ground of a steady bass pulse...

They stood there a long time, while the vases sang. There were a hundred of them, more than a hundred. A field or garden of vases. Clustered like organ pipes. Standing alone on shaped pedestals. Gleaming in the sunlight. Stained with cloudy blushes of pink and purple. Singing, singing.

At last, Lexi took Mai’s gloved hand and led her across the crater floor to where the robot mule, Archie, was waiting. Mai took out the pouch of human dust and they plugged it into the spray pistol’s spare port. Lexi switched on the pistol’s heaters, showed Mai how to use the simple trigger mechanism.

“Which one shall we spray?” Mai said.

Lexi smiled behind the fishbowl visor of her helmet.

“Why not all of them?”

They took turns. Standing well back from the vases, triggering brief bursts of gritty ice that shot out in broad fans and lightly spattered the vases in random patterns. Lexi laughed.

“The old bastard,” she said. “It must have taken him hundreds of days to make this. His last and best secret.”

“And we’re his collaborators,” Mai said.

It took a while to empty the pouch. Long before they had finished, the music of the vases had begun to change, responding to the subtle shadow patterns laid on their surfaces.

At last the two woman had finished their work and stood still, silent, elated, listening to the music they’d made.


THAT NIGHT, BACK under the dome of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat, Mai thought of her father working in that unnamed crater high on the rimwall of Amata crater. Chipping at adamantine ice with chisels and hammers. Listening to the song of his vases, adding a new voice, listening again. Alone under the empty black sky, happily absorbed in the creation of a sound garden from ice and sunlight.

And she thought of the story of Fiddler’s Green, the bubble of light and warmth and air created from materials mined from the chunk of tarry ice it orbited. Of the people living there. The days of exile becoming a way of life as their little world swung further and further away from the sun’s hearthfire. Green days of daily tasks and small pleasures. Farming, cooking, weaving new homes in the hanging forest on the inside of the bubble’s skin. A potter shaping dishes and bowls from primordial clay. Children chasing each other, flitting like schools of fish between floating islands of trees. The music of their laughter. The unrecorded happiness of ordinary life, out there in the outer dark.