There were more tests: days and days of tests. The crew ramped up antiproton production and began to build a second motor. The prototype was unbolted from the static-firing rig and fitted inside Newt and Macy’s tug, and Newt took the little ship out on a test flight that looped around Uranus’s outermost moon, Ferdinand. A round trip of more than forty million kilometres, there and back again in less than a day.
After this triumph, Newt and the rest of the motor crew put their plans for a real trip beyond the Uranus system to the general assembly where all matters large and small were decided by debate and free vote. Newt made a passionate speech, using all his considerable charm and fluency; the senior tech wizard, Ziff Larzer, explained that most of the crew would stay behind, manufacturing motors and fitting them into ships, while the expedition was away. But they had to field numerous objections, principally from a group led by Mary Jeanrenaud, who was not only the oldest member of the Free Outers, but had been one of the leaders of the peace and reconciliation movement before the war. She commanded a considerable amount of respect, and talked eloquently about the need to conserve resources, to build outwards, yes, but only from strong foundations.
‘We do not yet have those foundations in place. We are getting there, it’s true, but to achieve that goal all of us must work together. I can understand that some have grown impatient and find it difficult to keep a steady course. But we must not falter, difficult though it may seem. For otherwise we are in danger of dissipating our energies and our goals, of rushing off in too many different directions, after too many dreams. And that will leave us divided, and weak and vulnerable.’
Mary Jeanrenaud won considerable applause for this, and when it had died down Idriss Barr stood up and ankled to the bottom of the grass bowl. He wasn’t exactly the leader of the Free Outers’ democratic collective, but he was one of the people who listened to every side of every argument, arbitrated on minor disputes, and generally united the group. Tall and lithe and vigorous, he possessed an easy authority that he wore lightly and carelessly for the most part, but wouldn’t hesitate to use when he wanted to make a point or force a discussion in the direction he wanted it to go. He spoke now about their future. They would make a choice today and they must unite behind that choice and joyfully and gladly seize the opportunities it would give them.
‘We’ve done so much here in just a year. It’s amazing. And we will continue to amaze ourselves,’ he said. ‘We have shown that we can make our home anywhere we choose. We should not be afraid of fresh challenges, because we know that we have the resolve and skill to overcome them. Here at Uranus, and at Neptune, at Pluto, or anywhere else in the Solar System.’
Macy was astonished. Previously, Idriss Barr had supported the motor crew’s work on the strict condition that they had just one goal: to fit out every ship with the fast new fusion motor so that, when the time came, they could outrun any attempt at pursuit. Now he was calling for exploration and expansion.
‘He changed his mind and you knew it,’ she said to Newt, who was sitting next to her at the top of the grassy bowl. ‘That’s why you’ve been so calm. You had a secret weapon all along.’
‘Idriss is a good man who wants the best for everyone. He likes to lead from the rear, and he can be persuaded to change his mind if you show him what other people think,’ Newt said. ‘We canvassed people we reckoned were sympathetic to us, showed him the results. Mary and her friends have a lot of kudos, but kudos doesn’t mean too much out here. And most of us want to explore and spread out. We always have. It’s why we’re here.’
‘My partner the politician.’
‘It isn’t politics. It’s common sense. Not much different from figuring out how to pitch the price of a hold full of tea moss, it turns out.’
One by one people stood up and descended to the centre of the circle and picked up a small white plastic ball and dropped it in one of two glass cylinders, one tinted red for no, one tinted green for yes. The proposal to mount an exploratory expedition to Pluto and Neptune quickly gained a clear majority. By the time Macy’s turn came and she dropped her ball in the green-tinted cylinder, it was almost full.
Idriss Barr asked if he really needed to declare the count, winning laughter from the people circled around. So it was decided, and because Newt’s crew had already made detailed flight plans covering every aspect of the expedition, departure was scheduled for just twenty days later. Food and drink were brought out, several people started up a percussion group, and the meeting turned into a party that lasted late into the night.
They were on their way.
2
The spy spent more than four hundred days looking for Zi Lei on Iapetus. It should have been easy to find her. There were only ten thousand indigenous inhabitants, plus a few hundred people who’d fled from other moons or had been stranded there by the war. And he knew where she’d been born: the farm at Grandoyne Crater that her family still owned, the very first place he visited. Her family welcomed him warmly, for he was a friend who’d known her when she’d been living in Paris, Dione, someone who could tell them what she had been doing before the war and how she had escaped from prison when it had started. But they claimed that they did not know where she was now and said that they’d lost contact with her when she’d left Iapetus more than five tears ago.
‘She stopped taking her medication,’ Zi Lei’s mother said.
‘She believed that she was on a mission,’ Zi Lei’s father said.
They were both olive-skinned and black-haired like their daughter, with the same tuck in the corners of their dark brown eyes. Zi Lei had left without warning, they said. It had taken them some time to discover that she’d hitched a ride on a tug that had returned to Xamba, Rhea, after trading with farms and oases in the region. Her mother had gone to Xamba to talk to her, but Zi had already moved on, to Paris, Dione, and had ignored all attempts to contact her ever since.
The spy told Zi’s parents that she had friends in Paris who had encouraged her to take the medicine that kept her calm and suppressed her fantasies, although she had not always listened to their advice.
‘Were you happy together?’ Zi’s mother said.
‘I tried my best to take care of her.’
‘But were you happy?’
‘As much as we could be,’ the spy said. ‘She taught me many things.’
Talking about his feelings for Zi Lei made him feel uncannily naked. Scared and exposed but also weirdly happy. As if the world and his purpose were completely aligned and in harmony: every atom, every quantum of energy singingly aware that he was in love with Zi Lei and he was on a mission to find her. He’d been on a mission when he had slipped into Paris before the war, of course, but this time he wasn’t driven by loyalty and duty but by love. A love he believed to be pure and selfless. All his life he had been trained to complete his mission or die trying. He would not stop searching for Zi until he found her or discovered what had happened to her.
‘She isn’t always easy to love,’ Zi’s mother said, with a wistful smile uncannily like her daughter’s.
‘No.’
‘But you came here anyway,’ Zi’s father said. ‘My daughter might not be grateful that you did, but we are.’
Zi’s family promised that they would do all they could to help, but the spy did not entirely trust them and he wasted ten days at their habitat, discreetly searching the gardens and fields under the pleated tent, and the vast fields of vacuum organisms that patched the coal-black plain of the crater’s floor, until he was certain that Zi was not hiding or being hidden there. All right, then. He would look for her everywhere else.
At a little over fifteen hundred kilometres in diameter, Iapetus was the third-largest moon in the Saturn System, but it was sparsely inhabited and had no large centres of population, only widely scattered farms, small garden habitats, and smaller oases. Although most farms and habitats were located in a belt roughly defined by the thirtieth parallels north and south of the equator, with rather more people living in the bright half, Roncevaux Terra, than in the dark half, Cassini Regio, the spy had a lot of territory to cover. Fortunately, the Pacific Community expeditionary force that now controlled the moon allowed its inhabitants free passage everywhere except Othon Crater, north of the equator in the sub-saturnian hemisphere, where they were building a large base, so the spy was able to search for Zi Lei unhindered and unchallenged.
He travelled in the skin of Ken Shintaro. The old identity he’d used while living his double life in Paris before the war; the name by which Zi Lei had known him. If she heard that Ken Shintaro was looking for her, she would surely come looking for him.
In the beginning he travelled alone, hitching rides from place to place and undertaking various spells of unskilled labour to pay for his board. But then he was given a lift by a gypsy prospector, Karyl Mezhidov, and after he heard Ken Shintaro’s story about searching for the woman he had loved and lost Karyl offered to drive him to most of the places he hadn’t yet visited. And so the spy spent more than two hundred days with Karyl, travelling on either side of Iapetus’s equatorial range.
Iapetus’s most famous physical characteristic was its two-tone coloration: one half covered with water-ice, the other with a layer of black or reddish-brown material, mostly carbon-rich dehydrogenated tholins. A dusting of this dark organic material could be found on other moons, including Dione, Hyperion and Epimetheus, as well as in the F Ring of the ring system, but on Iapetus it formed layers many metres thick. The best current theory was that it had been lofted into orbit around Saturn in the aftermath of the violent destruction of the object whose major remnant, after being considerably modified by subsequent impacts, had become the irregularly shaped honeycomb moon Hyperion. Much of it, in the form of fine, electrostatically charged dust, had been swept up by Iapetus, the next moon in from Hyperion, and had flowed into the floors of craters and had been converted into a tarry crust through chemical reactions driven by the ultraviolet component of sunlight, cosmic radiation, and charged particles from Saturn’s magnetosphere. Iapetus’s farmers cultivated more than a hundred types of vacuum organism that grew on this substrate and turned it into every kind of organic compound, from CHON food to the complex strands of artificial DNA used in AI chips.
Even if Iapetus had not been divided into dark and light halves, it would still have been notable for its great equatorial ridge, whose isolated peaks and long crests rose in places to more than twenty kilometres above the surrounding plains, and extended for more than 1300 kilometres through the centre of Iapetus’s dark hemisphere, running almost exactly along the line of the equator. This gigantic mountain range was a remnant of the moon’s early oblate shape. When Iapetus had formed by accretion from the disc of rubble around proto-Saturn, it had been spinning so rapidly that its lithosphere, still plastic because it was warmed by radioactive decay of nucleotides, principally aluminium-26, had been distorted, fattening around the equator. But aluminium-26 has a short halflife and Iapetus was too far from Saturn to be significantly stretched and kneaded by tides, so the moon had stabilised and cooled very quickly after formation, and the bulge at its equator had been preserved like the raised seam at the joint of the two halves of a walnut shell.
The massive weight of the ridge had stressed and compressed the surface to either side. Thrust and high-angle reverse faults had created scarps and ridges, and during thermal expansion of the icy lithosphere early in Iapetus’s history, ammonia-water melt from deep in the interior had risen through faults and flooded parts of the surface, forming smooth plains that had been heavily cratered during the period of heavy bombardment, when large bodies like Iapetus ploughed through leftover debris - there were a good number of large impact basins in Iapetus’s leading hemisphere, including one more than five hundred kilometres across. Then a violent collision had shattered Hyperion’s parent body and spilled dark material across the sky, which had been swept up by Iapetus’s leading hemisphere and like a fall of haematic snow had covered and softened the features on half its globe. This deep blanket hid from satellite surveys intrusions and volcanic deposits rich in minerals along the length of the great equatorial ridge: a century of exploration had not yet exhausted them, and gypsy prospectors like Karyl Mezhidov could still make a good living.
Karyl was only a couple of years older than the spy’s supposed age of twenty-four, a lanky, gentle man whose long blond hair was brushed back from his sharp face and caught up in a braid woven through with thin coloured wires. The braid hung to the small of his back when he was driving, and he coiled and pinned it up before climbing into his pressure suit. He had a partner who lived on her family’s farm, no children as yet. He and his partner planned to start a family soon, Karyl told the spy, and then he’d settle down and build a little dome and grow every kind of fruit bush inside it. But for a little while yet he had to accumulate the credit and kudos he needed to start up his own farm, exploring the badlands either side of the great equatorial ridge, searching out remnants of stony or iron meteorites, and deposits of phosphates, sulphates and nitrates left by ancient cryovolcanic eruptions. Although it was a lonely life and often frustrating, with long dry spells when he sank hole after hole in likely terrain yet uncovered nothing useful, Karyl loved the freedom and the unpredictability. Like every prospector he was a born gambler, and the prospect of finding a rich mother-lode of valuable minerals or metals, reinforced by the occasional small strike, drove him ever onward across the rugged unpeopled moonscapes.
He habitually played music as he drove. Serial compositions from the twentieth century; antiphonal church music of the sixteenth century; the a cappella religious chants, polyphonic heroic songs, and wild dance music of North Caucasia, the homeland of his ancestors. And he was usually floating on one or other of his home-brewed psychotropics, too. He had a small automated laboratory in the cabin of his rolligon, and was continually tinkering with endorphins, attempting to achieve an ideal oceanic state in which world and self melted together. On his best days, he told the spy, he diffused outward into the moonscape and became one with it, and in that state of blissful understanding potential rifts, lodes and reefs shone out with their own particularity as if illuminated from within.