Newt noticed this of course, and they had a little spat about it. He said that she was worrying needlessly because she didn’t trust the competence and judgement of his friends; she said that this was yet another example of the way he dismissed the problems she was having in adapting to the Outer life.
‘You were born to this,’ Macy said. ‘It’s all you know. But I have to think about everything you don’t need to think about. It’s like having to remember to breathe all the time. Or having to think about keeping my heart beating, because it’ll stop if I don’t.’
‘I know that. All I want to do is find a way of helping you get over it.’
‘It isn’t about “getting over it.” It isn’t even about the fact that I’ll probably have to spend the rest of my life hidden in some tunnel, or in some tiny cupboard like this,’ Macy said, gesturing around her at Elephant’s cramped living quarters. ‘It’s about air generators and ion shields and everything else. All the stuff that protects us from cold and vacuum and radiation. It’s about always being aware that we could all die if just one little thing goes wrong. If you knew what a tightrope was, I’d say that it was like trying to live your life while walking along a tightrope over a drop a hundred kilometres deep. It’s not like I’m always thinking about the drop. Sometimes I can forget the drop is there. For days at a time. I can look around, enjoy the view. But then there’ll be a little slip, a little wobble, and there it is, right below me. Waiting to swallow me up.’
Newt studied her, solemn as a doctor about to deliver an unpalatable diagnosis. Her strange pale long-limbed lover. His sharp face and fine blue eyes. His disordered shock of black hair. ‘You’re homesick,’ he said at last.
Macy had to laugh, because he so didn’t get it. They’d talked about it before, and he always thought, because he’d been brought up in a culture that believed that everything was explicable and all problems had a solution, that it was some kind of temporary panic, a symptom of something else, something they could work at fixing. She’d talked to other Outers about it, too, tried to explain that even when she found some strange and wonderful beauty in Miranda’s moonscapes - like the time she’d hiked a trail and scrambled up a fallen block and at the top seen savagely incised terraces dropping more than ten kilometres to a plain gleaming flat and smooth as a frozen sea, running out to the horizon where Uranus hung in the black sky, fat and blue as Earth - even when she dissolved out into something as wonderfully, eerily beautiful as that, the click of a valve or the change in pitch of the fan that blew air across her face inside her helmet could bring her back with a jolt, remind her that if she wasn’t cased in her pressure suit she’d die in less than a minute, a race between asphyxiation and freezing solid . . . Oh, she knew that her pressure suit and all the other mechanisms and systems that kept her alive were proven, reliable, and pretty much foolproof. But it wasn’t about trusting them: it was about being utterly dependent on them. It was a hindbrain thing, one of her friends said. A problem of adaptation, another claimed. They’d offered fixes - neural programming, tailored psychotropics, and so on. Nothing had worked. Well, the psychotropics had given her a nice mellow buzz, like a second beer after a hard shift on a hot day, but she didn’t want to be buzzed all the time.
So no one amongst the Outers really understood how Macy felt, not even Newt, and now she gave in, as she usually did, no point prolonging an argument for the sake of arguing, saying yes, maybe she was a little homesick.
‘I miss the habitat back on Dione sometimes,’ Newt said.
‘So do I. And everyone there.’
‘Yeah,’ Newt said, after a brief pause.
‘I’m sorry,’ Macy said, instantly contrite. Newt didn’t mention his mother or the rest of his relatives and friends that often, but she knew that the loss was still raw. A large part of the reason why he’d spent so much time trying to get out from under his mother’s reputation was because they were alike in so many ways.
He shrugged it off with one of his funny little smiles. ‘If we’d stayed behind we’d have been thrown in jail too. It wouldn’t have changed anything.’
‘Even so.’
‘Instead, we came out here to make a new home. Something we can grow into together.’
‘That’s a nice thought.’
‘We’ll do it,’ Newt said. ‘It’s going to take time to find a place where we can be truly free, but we will. We’re going to live a long time, after all. Every kind of thing will be possible. Even returning to Earth.’
‘We’re going to have to live a very long time before that becomes possible,’ Macy said.
As far as everyone else was concerned the voyage out was a fine, exhilarating time. For forty-two days, as the two ships fell between worlds, they could enjoy true unbounded freedom, and when they finally made orbit around Pluto most of them thought that it was something of an anticlimax.
Pluto is about half the size of Earth’s Moon, and twice as big as its largest moon, Charon; they form a true binary system, revolving around a common centre rather than one around the other, not an uncommon arrangement in the Kuiper Belt. In addition, two small dark bodies, Hydra and Nix, orbit Pluto and Charon beyond the edge of a tenuous dusty system of ring arcs created from material knocked off the little moons by collision with Kuiper Belt objects. A compact toy of a system, as orderly and self-contained as an orrery.
Macy thought that Pluto looked a little like Mars. An ochre globe dappled here and there with pale yellows, expansive caps of white frost at its poles and a low relief surface pocked by craters and slashed by ancient rifts worn into broad, shallow valleys by thermodynamic erosion. And like Mars, Pluto possessed a faint atmosphere. As the frigid dwarf planet crept towards its closest approach to the sun, the slight increase in insolation caused thin layers of frost - nitrogen leavened with traces of carbon monoxide and methane - to sublime. Methane in the temporary atmosphere absorbed infrared radiation, and this greenhouse effect, and the cooling effect of sublimation at the surface, created an inverted temperature gradient: the temperature of Pluto’s atmosphere increased with height, and gas molecules at the top had sufficient energy to escape its shallow gravity well, bleeding away into space like the tail of a comet. And when the Pluto system passed perihelion and swung outward on its highly elliptical orbit and winter approached, Pluto’s atmosphere would freeze, and fall as frost across the surface. A cycle of seasonal changes that took almost two hundred and fifty years to complete.
After some debate, Newt and two other volunteers took Elephant out of orbit and landed close to the equator. Newt stepped down to the surface, the fifth human being to set foot on Pluto, saying casually, ‘Well, here we are,’ and the three of them bounced around for an hour and set several drones tracking away across the frosty plain, then took off and caught up with Out of Eden as the shuttle went into orbit around Charon.
The dark surface of the smaller component of the binary system was divided between terrain cut by cobweb grooves and terrain pitted like the skin of a cantaloupe, all of it painted by broad, bright swathes of crystalline water ice and dusted with ammonium hydrate frosts in the shadows of crater rims: deep beneath Charon’s surface was a shallow ocean of ammonia-rich water that here and there squeezed up through subsurface cracks, erupted in cryogeysers that deposited swathes of fresh frost across the dark surface, marking it in tiger stripes.
The Free Outers agreed that Charon was a place where human beings could live, roofing over troughs and grooves, tunnelling down to the zone of liquid water. Everyone took turns to descend to the surface. Macy went down with Newt, following him out across a lightly cratered plain, the two of them bouncing along in especially insulated pressure suits to the site of the first probe to have landed on Charon, some eighty years ago. An instrument platform slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, it stood at the end of a wandering track where its little fission pack had finally run out of energy. Stranded in a charcoal desert struck with little craters whose floors glimmered with pale frost. The close horizon circling around. The sun a brilliant star that even here, some 5.5 billion kilometres distant, so far away it took light more than five hours to span the distance, gave as much illumination as the full Moon, on Earth. Pluto’s half-disc hung in the starry black sky, dim and grey in the faint light, capped white at the poles. The two dwarf planets were tidally locked face to face as they circled their common centre, Pluto waxing from full to gibbous to full again every six days.
Macy told Newt that it was a magnificent view, but she couldn’t imagine living here. ‘It’s going to get very cold and dark in winter. And it will be hard to reach anywhere else.’
‘The new motor will make it easier than it used to be,’ Newt said. ‘Besides, it won’t be midwinter for more than a hundred years. And if we built habitats here, it will always be summer inside them.’
‘It’s so far away from anywhere else. Just this pair of frozen balls waltzing around each other and a couple of tiny chunks of tarry ice dancing attendance . . .’
‘Is this your homesickness?’
‘This is something else. I feel like I’m a ghost in a stranger’s house.’
‘Right now, it is what it is,’ Newt said. ‘Sure, it’s empty and unmarked. But so were Saturn’s moons when the pioneers arrived.’
‘Pioneers,’ Macy said. ‘There’s a lonely little word.’
‘That’s what we are, like it or not.’
The expedition explored Charon for ten days. They located tracts of carbonaceous material deposited by impacts with Kuiper Belt objects, and seeded them with vacuum organisms. They launched a satellite that would in time provide detailed topographical and geological maps. And then they began the long voyage back to Uranus. Everyone was bound close by their shared experience, and Macy felt that she was an integral part of the little band of adventurers now. She would never forget Earth, and she did not think that she could ever come to think of the stark and frigid moonscapes as any kind of home. But she was no longer a stranger, here in the outer dark.
4
The spy woke slowly and painfully, trapped in the stiff embrace of his pressure suit, inside the coffin-sized confines of the dropshell. He felt as if he’d been beaten by experts and afterwards staked out in the scorching heat of some desert on Earth. Bruised to the bone, joints stiff and swollen. A black headache pulsing like a poisonous spider inside the tender jelly of his brain. His tongue a shrivelled corpse glued to the floor of its foul tomb. He sipped tasteless recycled water through a tube and wincingly plugged into the dropshell’s myopic sensorium. He’d slept for seventy-two days and now Rhea was directly ahead, a bright pockmarked globe hanging beyond the broad hoop of the rings and the bulge of Saturn’s equator.
The dropshell hadn’t logged any radar pings or attempts to make contact: its skimpy little coffin had managed to spiral inwards without being detected by traffic control. The spy pulled up the navigation AI, picked his way through the limited options it presented, chose the least worst compromise. Attitude jets popped and stuttered, Rhea and Saturn swung in the black sky, and then the main motor ignited with a dull thump, a brief burn that would bring him out of orbit to a spot a little to the south of Rhea’s equator, on the sub-saturnian hemisphere.
Rhea is Saturn’s second-largest moon, a fat ball of water ice wrapped around a core of silicate rock, its leading hemisphere scribed by a gigantic multi-ringed basin, its dark trailing hemisphere fractured by long tracts of bright cliffs. When pioneering Outers had arrived at the Saturn System more than a century ago, they’d settled on Rhea and excavated tunnels and small caves in the rock-hard water ice of the inner face of Xamba Crater’s rim, a primitive little warren that had become the Saturn System’s first city. Now the spy’s stealthed dropshell fell in a slow, swooning arc that terminated in blocky terrain a little to the east of the outer edge of Xamba Crater.
It was midday. Rhea was passing through Saturn’s shadow. In the darkness of this eclipse the spy hiked to a nearby shelter. He planned to rest up for a day, shower, eat a hot meal or two, recharge the batteries of his pressure suit and top up its stores of oxygen and water. But when he reached the shelter he found that the swathe of sunflowers around it had been smashed down and the inner and outer hatches of its tiny airlock hung open and it was cold and dark inside. The AI was dead, the oxygen stores had been vented, the water tank was frozen solid, and the printer and foodmaker were missing. A notice stencilled in red paint on the wall over the sleeping niche announced in English, French and Russian that the shelter had been closed by authority of the TPA and anyone needing help should contact the waymaster on radio channel 9. And no doubt be arrested as a spy or saboteur, the spy thought sourly. He checked the dark little cave and the trampled area around its hatch in case a bug or two had been left behind to tattle-tale on trespassers, then hiked on towards the softly contoured slopes of the crater’s rim.
It was a long walk even in Rhea’s vestigial gravity, and he felt horribly exposed in the stark light of the sun’s diamond chip, which hung high overhead in the black sky, just beyond Saturn’s crescent. He picked his way between bright scarps at the crest of the rim, and trudged down a long valley on the inner slope to the lightly cratered plain of the floor.
Sombre fields of vacuum organisms spread around and beyond the platforms and tents of the spaceport. Berms of bright ice-rubble that no doubt roofed the Europeans’ facility were set at right angles to the railway that connected the spaceport with the city, which was buried in a scarp that cut into the crater’s rim. Several hundred rolligons and other vehicles drawn up in neat lines. A starfish of farm tubes, each tube a kilometre long, panes darkly polarised.
The spy spent an hour carefully reconnoitring the area all around the farm before breaking into the service airlock of the northernmost tube. He stripped off his pressure suit and disposed of his halflife suit-liner, which stank of old sweat and was mottled with necrotic patches, washed as best he could with soaked paper towels, dressed the weeping sores and rashes that had broken out across his flanks and thighs, pulled on a set of paper coveralls, and ambled between long rows of bean and tomato plants as if he belonged there.