“Hmm,” he said.
“You don’t agree. You like it.”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and walked a few meters away from her.
He didn’t want to talk about it. Swan went off to look at more Venetians. For her art was something to make, first and foremost, and after that something to talk about. Ineffable aesthetic responses, communing with a work—these struck her as too precious. One of the portraits glowered, another tried to suppress a little ironic smile; they agreed with her. She was out here with a stick of a toad. Mqaret had said Alex revered this man, but now she doubted it could be true. Who was he? What was he?
A low recorded announcement informed them it was time for the tram to take them back to Terminator, which would soon be catching up to their longitude—as would the sun. “Oh no!” Wahram exclaimed faintly as he heard the announcement. “We’ve only just started!”
“There are over three hundred paintings here,” Swan pointed out. “One visit will never do. You’ll have to come back.”
“I hope,” he said. “These are really magnificent. I can see why they called him Il Furioso. He must have worked every day.”
“I think that’s right. He had a place in Venice that he rarely left. A closed shop. His assistants were mostly his children.” Swan had just read this on one of the notes.
“Interesting.” He sighed and followed her to the tram.
On the ride back to the city, they passed a group of sunwalkers, and Swan pointed them out. Her guest roused himself from his reverie and looked.
“So they have to keep moving,” he said. “How do they rest, eat, sleep?”
“We eat on our feet, and sleep in carts pulled by companions,” Swan said. “We take turns at that, and on it goes.”
He gave her a look. “So you have an inexorable spur to action. I can see the appeal.”
She almost laughed. “Do you need such a spur?”
“I think everyone does. Don’t you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But you join these ferals,” he said.
“That’s just to do it. To see the land and the sun. I check out things I made, or do a little crack mining. I don’t need to find reasons to stay busy.”
This was exactly backward, she realized, and shut her mouth.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “Most people do.”
“Do you think?”
“Yes.” He gestured at the sunwalkers, whom they were rapidly leaving behind. “What happens if you run into an obstruction that keeps you from continuing westward?”
“You have to avoid those. In some places they’ve built little ramps that go up cliffs, or trail systems that get through chaotic terrain quickly. There are routes established. Some people stick to certain routes, some do them all. Others like to try new terrain. It’s pretty common to do a complete circumnavigation.”
“Have you done that?”
“Yes, but it’s too long for me. I usually go out for a week or two.”
“I see.”
It was pretty clear he didn’t.
“We were made to do this, you know,” she said suddenly. “Our bodies are nomads. Humans and hyenas are the two predators that chase their prey down by wearing it out.”
“I like walking,” he allowed.
“So what about you? What do you do to occupy your time?”
“I think,” he said promptly.
“And that’s enough for you?”
He glanced at her. “There’s a lot to think about.”
“But what do you do?”
“I suppose I read. Travel. Listen to music. Look at the visual arts.” He thought some more. “I work on the Titan project, that’s very interesting, I find.”
“And the Saturnian league, more generally, Mqaret tells me. System diplomacy.”
“Yes, well, my name came up in the lottery and I had to do my time, but it’s almost over now, and then I plan to return to Titan and get back to my waldo.”
“So… what were you and Alex working on?”
His pop eyes took on a look of alarm. “Well, some of it she wouldn’t want me to talk about. But she spoke of you often, and now that she’s gone, I just wondered if she might have left you a message. Or even arranged things such that you might be able to step in a bit in her absence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you designed many of the terraria out there, and now they form the bulk of the Mondragon Accord. They would listen to you, perhaps, knowing you were one of Alex’s closest confidantes. So… possibly you could go out with me and meet some people.”
“What, to Saturn?”
“To Jupiter, actually.”
“I don’t want to do that. My life is here, my work. I traveled the system enough when I was young.”
He nodded unhappily. “And… you are quite certain Alex didn’t leave anything for you? Something to give to me, in case something happened to her?”
“Yes, I’m sure! There’s nothing! She didn’t do things like that.”
He shook his head. They sat in silence as the tram slid over the dark face of Mercury. To the north some hilltops were just sparking white with the rising sunlight. Then the top of Terminator’s dome appeared over the horizon, like the shell of a transparent egg. As it cleared the horizon, the city looked like a snow globe, or a ship in a bottle—an ocean liner on a black sea, caught in a bubble of green light. “Tintoretto would have liked your city,” Wahram said. “It looks like a kind of Venice.”
“No it doesn’t,” Swan said crossly, thinking hard.
TERMINATOR
Terminator rolls around Mercury just like its sunwalkers, moving at the speed of the planet’s rotation, gliding over twenty gigantic elevated tracks, which together hold aloft and push west a town quite a bit bigger than Venice. The twenty tracks run around Mercury like a narrow wedding band, keeping near the forty-fifth latitude south, but with wide detours to south and north to avoid the worst of the planet’s long escarpments. The city moves at an average of five kilometers an hour. The sleeves on the underside of the city are fitted over the track at a tolerance so fine that the thermal expansion of the tracks’ austenite stainless steel is always pushing the city west, onto the narrower tracks still in the shade. A little bit of resistance to this movement creates a great deal of the city’s electricity.
From the top of the Dawn Wall, which is a silvery cliff forming the eastern edge of the city, one can see the whole town stretching out to the west, green under its clear dome. The city illuminates the dark landscape around it like a passing lamp; the illumination is very noticeable except at those times when high cliffs west of the city reflect horizontal sunlight into town. Even these mere pinpricks of the dawn more than equal the artificial lights inside the dome. During these cliffblinks nothing has a shadow; space turns strange. Then the mirrors are passed; that light fades. These shifts in illumination are a significant part of the sensation of movement one has in Terminator, for the glide over the tracks is very smooth. Changes in light, slight tilts in pitch, these make it seem as if the town were a ship, sailing over a black ocean with waves so large that when in their troughs, the ship drops into the night, then on high points crests back into day.
The city sliding at its stately pace completes a revolution every 177 days. Round after round, nothing changing but the land itself; and the land only changes because the sunwalkers include landscape artists, who are out there polishing mirror cliffs, carving petroglyphs, erecting cairns and dolmens and inuksuit, and arranging blocks and lines of metal to expose to the melt of day. Thus Terminator’s citizens continuously glide and walk over their world, remaking it day by day into something more expressive of their thoughts. All cities, and all their citizens, move in just such a way.
SWAN AND ALEX
The next day Swan returned to Mqaret’s lab. Again he was in his office staring at nothing. Suddenly Swan realized it was a relief to have something to be angry at.
Mqaret roused himself
. “How was your trip out with Wahram?”
“He’s slow, he’s rude, he’s autistic. He’s boring.”
Mqaret smiled a little. “Actually it sounds like you found him interesting.”
“Please.”
“Well, I can assure you Alex found him interesting. She spoke of him pretty often. A few times she made it clear they were involved in things she thought were very important.”
This gave Swan pause, as it was meant to. “Gran, can I have another look around her study?”
“Of course.”
Swan went down the hall to Alex’s room at the end, entered, and closed the door. She went to the one window and looked out at the city, all roof tiles and greenery from this vantage point.
She wandered around the study, looking at things. Mqaret had not yet changed anything. She wondered if he would, and if so, when. All Alex’s things, scattered as always. Her absence was a kind of presence, and again grief stabbed through Swan’s middle and she had to sit down.
After a while she stood and began a more methodical examination. If Alex had left something for her, where would she have put it? Swan could not guess. Alex had wanted always to keep her business offline, out of the cloud, unrecorded, live only, in real time only. But if she had done anything like this, she would have to have figured out some kind of method. Knowing her, it might be a purloined-letter type of thing: a paper note, for instance, right there on her desktop.
So Swan hunted through small stacks of paper on her desk, still thinking it over. If she had had information she wanted Swan to pass along, without Swan necessarily knowing what it was… if there were a lot of data… possibly it would be more than a paper note. And possibly she would want only Swan to find it.
She began to wander the room, talking to herself, and looking closely at things. The room’s control AI would know the room was occupied by only a single person and, with voice and retina, could certainly be set to identify the person.
There was a little toilet room attached to the study, with a sink and mirror, so now she went into it. “I’m here, Alex,” Swan said sadly. “I’m here if you want me.”
She looked into the wall mirror, then into a little oval mirror on a stand next to the sink. Sad Swan’s bloodshot eyes.
A jewelry box next to the oval mirror fell open; Swan jumped back into the wall, then collected herself. She looked in the box. Jewelry tray; take it out; and under it were three small white paper envelopes. All had written on one side In Case of My Death; on the other sides they were marked For Mqaret, For Swan, and For Wang on Io.
Hands trembling, Swan took the one marked for her and tore it open. Two little data tabs fell out. One of them was murmuring, “Swan, Swan, Swan.” Swan put it to her ear, her teeth clenched, tears starting to her eyes.
“My dear Swan, I am sorry you are hearing this,” Alex’s voice said. It was just like hearing a ghost, and Swan clutched her hands over her chest.
The little voice went on: “Very sorry, in fact, because if you’re hearing this, it means I’m gone. My room AI has heard about my death, and it knows to open this box if you come in here alone. It’s the best plan I could think of. Sorry to intrude on you like this, but it’s important. This is kind of an insurance policy, because I’ve got some things going on that need to continue even if I die, and I don’t want to tell anyone else here about them. And really at our age you can go any time, so I’m setting this up. If you’re hearing this, I need your help. Please take the envelope for Wang out to Io and give it to him in person. Wang and I and a few others are working on a couple of very important projects together, and we’ve been trying to keep completely offline with them, which is very difficult to do when we live so far apart. You can help me hugely by taking him his envelope. But please keep the matter entirely to yourself. Also, if you would let your Pauline read the other chip in your envelope and then destroy the chip, that would serve as a secure backup. They both are one-reads. I hate to do even this much. But I know you don’t usually link Pauline to other qubes, and if you would keep it that way, it would be better for our plan. Wang will explain more to you, as will Wahram from Titan. Good-bye, my Swan. I love you.”
That was it. Swan tried to listen to it again, but it was inert.
She put the other tab up to Pauline’s membrane, in the skin at the base of her neck. When Pauline said “Done” she put the inert tabs and the two remaining envelopes into her pocket and went to find Mqaret.
He was in his office, poking around in a 3-D image of what looked like a protein. “Look what I found,” Swan said. She explained what had happened.
“That box was locked,” Mqaret said. “I knew it was her jewelry, and I figured I would run into the key some time or other.”
He stared blankly at his envelope, seeming in no hurry to open it; possibly even a little afraid of it. Swan let him be, went out of the room. “Pauline,” she said after she left, “you got the contents of that tab?”
“Yes.”
“What was on it?”
“I am instructed to convey the information to Wang’s qube, on Io.”
“But tell me just generally what’s on it.”
Pauline did not reply, and after a while Swan cursed her and turned her off.
Both tabs were now inert; Alex’s ghost had departed. Swan was not entirely sorry. The shock of hearing Alex’s voice speaking to her was still causing her to tremble.
She went back into Mqaret’s office. He was white-faced, his mouth a little knot. He looked up at her.
“She gave you something to take to Io?”
“Yes. Do you know what it’s about?”
“No. But I do know Alex had an inner group of especially close associates. Wahram was one of them, and Wang too.”
“And what were they up to?”
Mqaret shrugged. “She spared me that kind of thing. But I could see she thought it was important. Something about Earth, I think.”
Swan thought it over. “If it was important, and she was keeping things off the record, she would have known her death might cause problems. So she left us these little recordings.”
“It was like her ghost,” Mqaret said shakily. “She spoke to me.”
“Yes,” Swan said, unable to say more. “Well… I guess I’m going to take the third envelope she left to Io, like she told me to.”
“Good,” Mqaret said.
“Wahram already asked me to go out there, now that I think of it. And he kept asking if she left us anything for him.”
Mqaret nodded. “He was part of it.”
“Yes. And that inspector too. So I guess I’ll go. But I don’t think I want to tell him about these messages. Alex didn’t say anything about that.”
“He may guess, just by the fact you’re going.”
“Let him guess.”
Now Mqaret regarded her with a sympathetic squint. “You’re going to have to figure things out as best you can. You may even have to step in and do some of the things Alex would have done.”
“How can I do that? No one can do that.”
“You don’t know. Pauline will help you, and maybe this Titan of yours also. And if you have to act in Alex’s place—she would have liked that.”
“Maybe.” Swan was not so sure.
“Alex will have had a plan. She always did.”
Swan sighed, lanced again by the thought of Alex’s absence. These ghostly messages were not even close to an adequate replacement for her. “All right, then. I’ll go out to see this Wang.”
“Good. And be ready to act.”
Swan found out where the offworld diplomats still in town were staying, went to the terrace where the Saturnian delegation had been housed. When she entered the courtyard of the place, she immediately came on Wahram, head down as he conferred with the little police inspector, Jean Genette. The sight of the two of them together gave her a shock, and something in their body language said they were well acquainted. Co-conspirators, by the look of them.
Ch
eeks burning, Swan approached them. “What’s this?” she demanded. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”
Neither of them at first replied.
Finally the small waved a hand. “Fitz Wahram and I often work together on various system issues. We were just now deciding to visit a mutual acquaintance.”
“Wang?” Swan said. “Wang of Io?”
“Why… yes,” the inspector said, looking up at her curiously. “Wang is an associate of ours, as he was of Alex. We were working together.”
“As I mentioned to you,” Wahram said in his low croak. “When we were coming back from Tintoretto.”
“Yes, yes,” Swan said sharply. “You asked me to join you on that trip, without really explaining why.”
“Well…” The toad man’s broad face was looking a little discomfited. “It’s true, but you see, there are reasons to be discreet….” He looked down at Genette as if hoping for help.
“I’m going,” Swan said, interrupting their glance. “I want to go.”
“Ah,” Wahram said with another quick glance at Genette. “Good.”
Extracts (1)
Take an asteroid at least thirty kilometers on its long axis. Any type will do—solid rock, rock and ice, metallic, even ice balls, although each presents different problems.
Attach a self-replicating excavator assembly to one end of the asteroid, and with it, hollow out your asteroid along its long axis. Leave the wall at least two kilometers thick at all points except for your entry hole. Assure the interior integrity of the wall by coating it with a dura of suitable strength.
As your assembly hollows the interior, be aware that ejection of the excavated material (best aimed toward a Lagrange salvage point, to collect the salvage fee) will represent your best chance to reposition your terrarium, if you want it in a different orbit. Store excess ejecta on the surface for later use.
When the interior is hollowed out, leaving an empty cylinder at least five kilometers in diameter and ten kilometers long (but bigger is better!), your excavator assembly will return to the access hole and there reconfigure itself into your terrarium’s propulsion unit. Depending on the mass of your new world, you may want to install a mass driver, an antimatter “lightning push” engine, or an Orion pusher plate.