‘I flew her here once,’ Cash said, startled by the memory. ‘A long, long time ago. Picked her up from some place in the Antarctic.’
Alder gave him a strange look. ‘About a year before the war?’
‘Something like that. Yeah, just before I went out to the Saturn System. Funny how I can remember some things and not others.’
‘There was some kind of crisis with one of her projects on the Moon,’ Alder said. ‘She returned in a foul temper. Something had badly frightened her, but she never talked about it.’
‘So this guy, he really could be some kind of monster?’
‘He could be my brother,’ Alder said. ‘My mother is a brilliant woman, but she has a monstrous ego. She would have found it amusing to use her own eggs or somatic cells to produce her ectogenes . . . In any case, we can’t let him fall into the hands of the Europeans, can we? Take him, and take Avernus too. She’s too preoccupied at present to be of much help.’
‘I think all this reminds her of what happened to her daughter,’ Cash said.
‘I think so, too. I’ll stay behind and deal with the evacuation of the guards and the prison administrators. It’s going to involve much delicate negotiation, but fortunately my mother gifted me with the ability to charm people into doing the right thing. Strange, isn’t it, how things work out?’
‘It’s a small world,’ Cash said, ‘but I wouldn’t like to be the guy who had to paint it.’
He flew east and north, crossing the northern edge of Hertzsprung Crater. Earth, half-full, rising ahead of him as he came around the near side. Above the western margin of Oceanus Procellarum he fired up the fusion motor, a brief hard burn to take the shuttle out of lunar orbit, then throttled back to a steady 0.2 g.
A few minutes later there was a commotion in the passenger compartment. Cash switched to internal video and saw Felice Gottschalk hauling himself along the ladder strung along what was usually the ceiling of the compartment but was presently, because of the axis established by the thrust of acceleration, one of its walls. Felice Gottschalk moved quickly, dragging the stiff post of his injured leg, and Avernus was climbing after him, above the heads of the first batch of Outer evacuees, who were sitting upright in two short rows of acceleration couches.
The shuttle was flying itself. Cash retracted the restraint webbing of his couch and reached up and swung around, bracing himself on the bulkhead beside the hatchway. Felice Gottschalk looked straight up at him. His face was the colour of paper and beaded with sweat, and he held himself awkwardly against the ladder because the thumb and two fingers of his left hand were dislocated; he must have hurt himself when he’d pulled free from his restraints.
‘I mean no harm,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to see Earth.’
Below him, Avernus told Cash that it was all right.
Felice Gottschalk, staring past Cash at the narrow window on the left-hand side of the cabin, said, ‘I didn’t know she was so beautiful. I wanted to see her one time before I died.’
‘So did I,’ Avernus said, her voice soft and strange.
She persuaded Cash to help Felice Gottschalk settle in the spare acceleration couch. He sat awkwardly because of his broken leg, but seemed immune or oblivious to any discomfort as he gazed with rapt and mute wonder at Earth’s half-globe. He was smiling. Earthshine set sparks in his eyes.
Avernus told him that everything would be all right. ‘I don’t care who you are or what you did on Dione. The past is the past. All that matters to me is that you saved the prisoners from someone who meant them harm. You did the right thing by them, and I’ll try to do the right thing by you.’
Cash saw that Felice Gottschalk’s head had tilted towards his chest. ‘There isn’t anything you can do for him now,’ he said, and reached over and gently closed the dead man’s eyes.
9
As far as most of the Free Outers were concerned, the revolution in Greater Brazil changed nothing. The Jupiter and Saturn systems were still controlled by the TPA, and both General Nabuco at Jupiter and Euclides Peixoto at Saturn had refused to acknowledge the authority of the revolutionary government. Then the Free Outers received a message from Tommy Tabagee, inviting them to send representatives to Iapetus, guaranteeing free passage and a voice in a debate on the future of the Outer System organised by the PacCom government.
At the meeting held to discuss this news, Loc Ifrahim argued eloquently and with great force in favour of sending representatives. He said that this was a hinge point in history. The chains of power had been broken and reforged in Greater Brazil, and her people had gladly taken up the burden of their own destiny. For it was a burden. Freedom was a burden. It was not something that could be taken for granted. It had to be fought for, and protected with unsleeping vigilance. The Free Outers had been presented with the opportunity to take part in that great struggle. They could agree to accept the Pacific Community’s invitation, take part in the great task of making history, help the people of Earth and the people of the Outer System reconcile their differences and forge a common future. Or they could refuse it, and relegate themselves and their children to the margins of human civilisation and human history.
This was greeted with a hostile silence. After a few moments, Idriss Barr said that fine talk about forging the future was all very well, but the future meant nothing if they did not survive to see it; before plunging headlong into the unknown, they should wait and see whether or not this revolution was permanent, and what it meant for Greater Brazil and for the Jupiter and Saturn Systems. Mary Jeanrenaud vigorously agreed. They had come out here to make new worlds and new ways of living, she said. They should not be dragged back into the old ways, and they should certainly not be influenced by outsiders. More than a dozen other people expressed similar views, and by a simple show of hands it was decided that the Free Outers would wait to see how things fell out on Earth and whether it had any effect on the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems before they committed to any kind of negotiations or discussions with outsiders.
Two days later Newt’s surveillance satellites picked up activity around Neptune: the Ghosts had launched four ships towards the Saturn System. A message sent from Triton, aimed at the Jupiter and Saturn Systems and relayed to the Free Outers by the PacCom settlement on Iapetus, made it clear that the Ghosts hadn’t accepted the invitation to talk. A long lecture about history and destiny laced with vicious diatribes against the sins of the TPA and the corruption and weakness of Earth and its peoples, it boiled down to a single warning: Quit our worlds or suffer the consequences. Either the Ghosts believed that the TPA was in disarray and might be defeated by a swift and bold attack, or this was some kind of suicide mission by fanatic martyrs, the first shot in a long war of attrition.
The Free Outers held another interminable debate and decided once again that they couldn’t risk sending anyone to Iapetus. Afterwards, Macy went for a swim in the tank at the heart of the habitat and hung at its pellucid centre for a long, long time. Only the sound of her breathing in her face mask, and the slosh of currents. Red and black fronds stirring to and fro like drowned fright wigs.
Loc Ifrahim had spoken of a hinge point in history. She could feel it turning inside her, a slow but irresistible tide.
That night she told Newt what she planned to do. He heard her out quietly and soberly, then asked why she felt she had to do it. They were lying side by side on conjoined crash couches in Elephant’s command blister. Talking quietly, faces just a few centimetres apart, the twins asleep in the main part of the cabin.
‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ Macy said. ‘Because Loc Ifrahim is right, and everybody else is wrong. I know I’m an outsider. I know that I still don’t understand everything about Outer society, but there isn’t any kind of Outer society right now. It’s been shattered. And this is our best chance to start to put it back together. I know a lot of people hope that the Ghosts are going to war against the TPA on behalf of all of the Outers, but it’s pretty obvious that this war fleet is part of that manifest-destiny thing of theirs. Trying to make the future come out the way it’s supposed to, according to the so-called prophesies of their leader.’
‘You know that. I know that,’ Newt said. ‘But most people won’t be happy if you go against a decision arrived at democratically. It could give you a short ride to a world of trouble. It got me in trouble more than once, back in the day.’
‘I don’t want this to get you into trouble now. I’ll make it clear that it’s on me. But I have to do it.’
Newt smiled. ‘There’s no way of talking you out of this, is there?’
‘None that I can think of.’
‘You better let me work up a flight profile.’
‘I got one from the navigation AI. It says it’s doable.’
‘It’ll say anything you want it to say, if you ask it the wrong questions.’
They talked about what they needed to do, what to tell the twins, what might happen if Macy was declared an outcast. They didn’t talk about whether or not Macy had made the right decision. They didn’t need to.
Like all the ships, Elephant had been kept topped up with fuel and consumables, ready to take off at a moment’s notice. And kidnapping Loc Ifrahim turned out to be amazingly easy. Macy told him that she had some more news about the rebellion in Greater Brazil - he needed to see it before she showed everyone else. When he came aboard Elephant and began to strip off his pressure suit, Macy slapped an air mask over her face and flushed a dose of sevofluorane into the lifesystem’s atmosphere, putting Loc under before he could begin to ask what she was doing. She kept him under with an anaesthetic patch, prepped him for hibernation, and packed him into a coffin. The difficult part was saying goodbye to the twins, who got it into their heads that she would be back in a day or so. Untangling that notion would be another hard task for Newt, after he’d explained to the rest of the Free Outers what Macy had done, and why.
She’d flown Elephant many times by now, but never before solo. Newt stayed in constant contact for the first hour and just finished helping her finesse the parameters of the burn that would put her on course for Saturn when Idriss Barr cut in, asking with anger and incredulity what she thought she was doing.
‘Making history,’ Macy said, and said goodbye to Newt and shut down the comms.
Elephant took sixty-three days to fall from Nephele to Saturn. Macy kept busy with housekeeping tasks, building up her muscle tone by exercising assiduously with intertial weights and on the stationary bicycle, and teaching herself basic navigation and practising landings and every other kind of manoeuvre in the tug’s virtual reality system. She routinely checked Loc Ifrahim’s hibernation coffin, and talked to Newt and the twins at least twice a day, morning and evening, sometimes more. As Elephant left Nephele behind, the lag in communications grew so great that they were forced to default to text messages and video blips.
Newt forwarded news transmitted by the PacCom base on Iapetus. The People’s Revolutionary Committee had established itself in Brasília and had announced a date for elections, but did not yet have authority over the entire country. Armand Nabuco and the remains of his government were holed up in Georgetown and controlled a swathe of territory between the Cuara River in the north and the Amazon in the south; six territories loyal to the former president had not yet surrendered; there was considerable insurgent activity everywhere else, led by former members of the OSS. More than a million people were living in refugee camps, there were food shortages and thousands were dying of disease every day, and it was the beginning of the hurricane season in those territories adjacent to the Caribbean. The only good news was that the European Union had refused to come to the aid of the deposed government, and the Pacific Community had declared that it was ready to supply aid if it was asked to do so, but would otherwise respect Greater Brazil’s sovereignty.
The People’s Revolutionary Committee and a group of Outer politicians who’d been imprisoned on the Moon had asked the TPA to engage in immediate talks aimed at finding a peaceful end to the occupation of the Outer System. The Brazilian authorities in the Jupiter System had not yet responded. In the Saturn System, the Europeans and the Pacific Community had indicated that they were willing to participate, but Euclides Peixoto had declared that he wouldn’t enter into any kind of talks until the Ghost ships currently heading towards Saturn turned back. If the Saturn System came under attack from any quarter, he said, he would retaliate with swift and deadly force.
As for the Free Outers, the majority wanted to wait and see what happened when the Ghosts reached the Saturn System.
‘There’s a vague and unfocused hope that it will solve itself somehow, ’ Newt told Macy, reporting on the latest debate about the crisis.
The twins were creating a garden on one of the hydroponic shelves. Macy did her best to encourage them, gazed wistfully at videos of their enthusiastic work and energetic play. They sent her scans of paintings and drawings and she printed them out and stuck them around the lifesystem. She recorded stories that Newt could play back to them, but it wasn’t the same as telling them stories in person. She missed them dreadfully and thought about them and Newt all the time, and kept herself busy so that she would not have time to regret leaving them.
It was the first time in many years that she had been so alone (Loc Ifrahim, sealed in his hibernation coffin, hardly counted as company). And she had never before been aboard Elephant without Newt. She remembered the long, languorous voyage after they’d fled from the Saturn System to Uranus at the end of the Quiet War. How they had made love everywhere, in every conceivable position. Newt teaching her the delights of free-fall sex after the motor had been switched off. Naked to each other for the first time. Learning each other’s bodies, alive with all five senses. Newt’s presence was imprinted everywhere inside the little ship but he was growing ever more distant as it fell through vast volumes of black vacuum.