The spy politely refused offers to sample Karyl’s extensive psychotropic library. As it was, the music and the inhuman scale of the moonscapes through which they travelled stirred up strange emotions that threatened his fragile sense of self; he was afraid that if he ingested a tab or slapped on a patch of one of Karyl’s drugs he’d lose control and melt and flow away and disappear completely.
They circumnavigated Iapetus twice, first travelling east, to the north of the great equatorial ridge, and then returning west, to the south of it. Across dark plains, through great rifts and ravines, beneath towering cliffs and bluffs, across heavily cratered slopes that swept up to pillowy peaks, some bitten or truncated by impact craters near or at their summits, giving them the appearance of volcanic calderas. The terrain here was more than four billion years old, battered by the great bombardment of the Solar System’s violent infancy and by a steady rain of meteorites ever since. The rolligon might spend a day crawling across the floor of a dished crater, climb the steep scarp on the far side, and top out at a broad rim that gave a view across a saddle valley towards the great dome of a peak that stretched from horizon to horizon and rose ten kilometres against the black sky, its flanks pitted by craters of every size and its top dished by some vast impact. And everything was blanketed by dark material that formed smooth crusts, or pavements of giant crazed polygons, or dusty wallows that had to be given a wide berth because they could swallow the rolligon whole.
Mostly, Karyl and the spy kept to the riven and cratered plains that bordered the great ridge, its smooth switchbacks rising beyond the close horizon, isolated peaks floating against the black sky like tethered moons. Guided by a combination of geological expertise and drug-enhanced instincts, Karyl truffled along domes, scarps, and anticlinal folds raised by compressional tectonism, mapped down-dropped blocks flooded by ancient cryovolcanic melts, hunted across ejecta aprons outside craters or probed their centres. He used radar and sonic imaging to map the terrain to a depth of half a kilometre, or deployed small robots that skittered off on three or four pairs of jointed legs, squatting here and there to drill into the frozen tars of the regolith and take samples of the underlying ice. If it was only lightly contaminated with mineral intrusions, Karyl seeded the ground with vacuum-organism packets that budded and grew and sent down pseudohyphae to absorb and concentrate metals. Rare veins and rifts were stripped out there and then and loaded onto one of the trailers hitched in a small train behind the rolligon; fragments of meteorites were retrieved by blasting open the ground or sending down serpentine robots that gnawed at the stony or metallic bolides with diamond teeth and pushed the fragments through peristaltic tubes to the surface. Karyl stopped at vacuum-organism fields he’d planted on previous trips, too, and he and the spy suited up and stripped out by hand scales rich in minerals absorbed from the regolith, hard but satisfying work in the absolute stillness of the dark moonscape.
But they spent more time travelling than mining, camping out in the rolligon for the most part, sometimes stopping at farms or oases for a day or two, where the spy would tell his story and ask everyone if they knew anything about Zi Lei, and Karyl would sit with his hosts and drink tea and nibble at sweet and savoury pastries, olives, and slices of watermelon, and dicker over prices for the phosphates and nitrates and breccias and metals he’d collected, gossip about small scandals and marriages and births and deaths, and speculate about the plans of the Pacific Community. Even when he didn’t sell anything but digested waste from the rolligon’s toilet, the farmers or villagers would give him a surfeit of fresh fruit and vegetables in exchange for hauling goods to one or another of their neighbours, or for a promise for goods or minerals he’d bring the next time he swung by.
The Pacific Community expeditionary force ruled with a lighter hand than either the Brazilians or the Europeans. In all their travels, Karyl and the spy only once met representatives of the occupying force, four polite soldiers in dark green uniforms who were making an inventory of equipment and crops on a farm. PacCom soldiers were confiscating a third of the fresh food grown by farms and oases, so everyone had to supplement their rations with CHON food or dole yeast. Every construction robot had been requisitioned, too - the PacCom base was the size of a small city now, and growing ever larger, a grid of segmented tubes buried under berms of icerock rubble much like the first settlements made on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn a century ago - and there was a regular traffic of ships plying between the Saturn System and Earth, bringing in troops and materiel, and a big factory appeared to be fabricating tugs after the pattern of those built by Outers.
Apart from the confiscation of crops and equipment, and the closure of the moon’s net and other communication systems, the occupation had little effect on the daily lives of the Iapetans. And yet everything had changed, and nothing would ever again be the same. The long-cherished belief that the Outers had created a utopian bubble that had floated free of the incessant barbarities of human history, and where every kind of art and scientific research could be endlessly explored and a variety of cooperative political and economic systems flourished in a rich and peaceful patchwork, had proven to be a delusion. Like a biome that had evolved in isolation on some remote island, it had been overwhelmed by the intrusion of vigorous and aggressive forces from the larger world. If the Outers ever regained their freedom, it would not be as before. From now on they would have to be ever-vigilant against attack and ready to defend themselves, with everything that entailed.
Everywhere Karyl and the spy went, there was talk of resistance and revolution, rumours of fresh atrocities on other moons, fantasies of escape into the outer dark at the edge of the Solar System. But nowhere was there any sign or news of Zi Lei - except once, when the spy talked to someone who had met her during her brief stay in Xamba, Rhea. It seemed that her parents had been telling the truth about that, so perhaps they’d also been telling the truth when they had said that they had heard nothing of their daughter before or after the war.
The spy’s quest was unfulfilled, yet he was not unhappy. He was convinced that he would find Zi Lei sooner or later, and meanwhile he was becoming comfortable in the skin of Ken Shintaro. Learning to be human, forgetting for days at a time the chill and fretful caution that had set him apart while he’d been at work in Paris, the constant low-level paranoia that anyone might be following or watching him, that he was caught in some great game where he didn’t know the identities of other players, or any of the rules. Then, he’d been constantly alert, checking his every action for deviancy from the norm, observing and judging not only the people around him but his own self. Now, he was at ease with Karyl - although it would have taken a lot of hard work to dislike the good-natured gypsy prospector - and the other Outers and most importantly with his own self.
The spy had been born and trained to fight for God, Gaia and Greater Brazil on the Moon. He had never been to Earth, but he had always dreamed of Earth’s soft green landscapes and trackless oceans, all stretched out under a sheltering sky of exquisite blue. An ideal approximating paradise. Now, during the long double circumnavigation of Iapetus, he learned to appreciate and to love the intrinsic beauty of its stark and empty moonscapes. How to read in its every form the processes that had shaped it; how its violent history had been softened by the blanket of in-fallen material and billions of years of slow sublimation and microscopic meteorite impacts that chipped and rounded every feature. A great work of time, working on scales ungraspable to the human mind.
Despite its bitter and unrelenting inhospitality, the Outers had learned how to live off the land. Ancient ice as hard as granite was mined and melted for water; water was electrolytically split to supply oxygen. Generations of gypsies like Karyl had seeded parts of the dark plains of Cassini Regio with vacuum organisms that used sunlight as energy and the dark material as substrate to grow and produce every kind of fullerene and organic polymer, and stores of simple organic molecules that could be spun into basic foodstuffs by the rolligon’s foodmaker. Other varieties soaked up the weak sunlight and transformed it into electrical energy and stored it in analogues of electric-eel muscle that, when tapped, could supply trickle charges to the rolligon’s batteries.
Miracles of nanotechnology, hives or self-organised swarms of various kinds of self-replicating microscopic machines modifying themselves and their behaviour according to simple rules, the vacuum organisms grew and multiplied in sunlight one-hundredth the strength of sunlight incident on Earth’s surface and temperatures as low as -200° Centigrade, forming structures like flowers or leafless trees, or scabs or filamentous tangles like giant lichens. Starkly simple forms that harmoniously echoed the spare and brutal beauty of the moonscapes in which they flourished. Driving past the ridge of a thrust fault overgrown with tangles of black wire, or mounting the crest of a slope towards the end of one of Iapetus’s long afternoons and seeing a vast prospect of rounded peaks spread out ahead, the light of the low sun throwing long shadows across the dark ground and picking silvery highlights from ridges and the far rims of craters, and Saturn’s pastel crescent tilted high in the black sky, caught in the luminous and laminated bow of its rings - the plane of Iapetus’s orbit, unlike those of the inner moons, was inclined to Saturn’s equatorial plane - the spy would be filled with a sense of wonder and his heart would lift and turn on a flood of happiness, and Karyl would look over at him and smile his gentle, dopey smile and say, ‘Yeah, ain’t it the shit?’
And so they drove, and so they drove. They stopped for thirty days at the farm owned by the parents of Karyl’s partner, Tamta. Karyl and Tamta, an elegantly thin and dreamy woman, drifted off to a little oasis some twenty kilometres from the main tent of the farm to renew their vows to each other, as Karyl put it. The spy volunteered for general labour in the farm tunnels, planting and pruning and harvesting, and learned how to make bread. Tamta’s parents were second-generation settlers nearing their centenaries; they had three sons and four daughters and a small tribe of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Tamta was a late addition to the family, born after her parents’ youngest child had died in an accident out in the vacuum-organism fields. She was younger than some of her nephews and nieces, in fact, but didn’t seem to find it strange.
At last, Karyl and Tamta emerged from their humid little Eden, and it was time to hit the road again. One day the spy realised that the place where he had left his dropshell was only five or six kilometres away, just beyond the curve of the horizon. When they parked up for the night, he stirred into Karyl’s white tea a hypnotic he’d manufactured with the help of a demon inserted into the foodmaker’s simple mind. Karyl fell asleep before the tea was half-drunk and the spy put him in the recovery position and said goodbye with a deep pang of sorrow - he had spent almost a year in the man’s company, and had grown to know him as well as he knew every one of his brothers.
He hiked off across the dark and level plain, dragging a sled loaded with air cylinders and several flasks of hydrazine. Karyl would be able to follow his tracks and retrieve the sled, but he’d have to forgive the debt of stolen air and fuel, the spy thought - and realised that he was thinking like an Outer. Feeling guilty because he had taken something without first striking some kind of deal. But it was only a small crime, and it was necessary. The spy was as certain as he could be that Zi Lei was no longer on Iapetus. It was time to move on to the next station of his quest.
It took less than an hour to revive and fuel the dropshell; took most of the stolen hydrazine to reach escape velocity and enter a minimal-energy orbit that would spiral inwards and eventually encounter Rhea. And if Zi Lei wasn’t there, the spy would go on. He would search the other moons in the Saturn System and if she was not on any of them he would have to find some way of tracking down the refugees who had fled to the moons of Uranus. He would keep searching for Zi Lei for the rest of his life, if he had to.
3
Pluto was currently approaching perihelion. Its highly elliptical orbit was not only carrying it inside the orbit of Neptune; it was also about as close to Uranus as it would ever get - currently, the ice giant and the dwarf planet were separated by less than two billion kilometres. As far as the Free Outers were concerned, there would never be a better time to pay a visit.
The expedition consisted of two ships equipped with fast-fusion motors, Newt Jones’s and Macy Minnot’s tug Elephant and the shuttle Out of Eden, carrying twenty-four people, six of them children. The presence of children another reminder to Macy that space was the Outers’ natural habitat: not something to be endured or survived but the place where they lived, so they saw no problem in taking their children off on a voyage into the unknown in ships powered by incompletely tested motors. Of course, the older children had more experience of ships and moonscapes than Macy, and could probably cope with any emergency better than she. And the Pluto system wasn’t exactly terra incognita, for it had been visited and mapped and sampled by robot probes and human explorers over the past two centuries. Even so, the dwarf planets of the outer dark were strange and incompletely understood, and a long way from anywhere else if something went wrong; Macy admired the Outers’ fearless can-do attitude and didn’t doubt their competence, but she knew that this wasn’t exactly a stroll in the park.
Elephant piggybacked on Out of Eden for most of the voyage. The shuttle was big enough to give an illusion of privacy to anyone who needed it, and her crew spun a fullerene sphere based on a design excavated from the Library of the Commons to provide additional living space: a transparent bubble some two hundred metres across stuck to Out of Eden’s belly like an egg-case, an airy arena where the members of the expedition could play sports and games and eat communal meals with the bright stars shoaled across the black sky all around, laughing and rough-housing as if it were perfectly natural, as if there wasn’t killing cold and vacuum everywhere beyond the bubble’s thin skin. Macy never could get entirely used to it, always felt a little plunge, a sudden intensification of her perpetual low-grade airplane fear, whenever a child playing tig or good-to-go bounced off the taut polymer.