‘You look well. Older, of course, but you are still my beautiful boy. You didn’t bring Berry.’
‘I asked him to come with me. He refused.’
‘You should have brought him. We could take care of him here.’
‘I’m sure you could,’ Alder said. ‘But he has his own life. His own way of surviving. His own way of escape. And he already has someone to look after him.’
‘The woman.’
‘His handfasted partner. The one person who truly cares for him, it seems.’
‘You think I have been a bad mother.’
‘I think we’ve both let him down.’
‘I did my best, but eventually I realised that nothing I could say or do would help him, so I left him to his own devices. It hurt me to do it. It hurts me still, to know how unhappy he is, how badly he is damaging himself.’
‘He came here, once upon a time. You turned him away.’
‘I was . . . changing. That is finished now. I am ready to look after him, but I would never force him to do anything he does not want to do. I would never bring him here against his will.’
‘I feel guilty about it too. He’s my brother. I should have reached out to him long ago, and I didn’t. And now it’s too late.’
‘Is he happy, do you think?’
‘He is what he is.’
‘I have followed your career with much interest, Alder. And with no little pride. Perhaps you are angry and upset that I did not answer your messages. To begin with, it was a matter of security. And then . . .’
‘You were busy. I understand. I understand you better than you think I do.’
‘I was busy, yes. There is always much work to do, and too little time. And I was changing, too. We were changing. Changing and growing. We are the clade now. One flesh, one purpose.’
‘So I see.’
‘Do you? Do you really understand?’
‘I think I have a fair idea of what you’ve done. But I don’t understand why you’ve done it.’
‘Walk with me,’ Sri said.
‘I’ve seen the wood. And the things in it.’
‘Indulge me anyway,’ Sri said.
Alder walked with lumbering and infinite care beside the graceful avatar through the green shade under the trees, the two of them followed by the pale blind children and a troop of lemurs that flowed from tree to tree. Things like severed hands shelled in bone lurked amongst tangled prop roots. At the bottom of a deep pool of clear water, nets of pale tubes pulsed and quivered like unstrung arteries across black sand. A flock of hand-sized butterflies whirled around a slanting shaft of chandelier light, their wings covered in pelts of fine black hair.
Sri explained that an early experiment in immortality had gone a little astray. Her body had swollen with tumours teeming with independent life and her crew and a team of expert systems modelled on her own memories and skills had put her in hibernation while they searched for a cure. Although the tumours were under control now, she was confined to a series of vats. It did not matter. She had cloned a family of sister-daughters, and used her genome as a template to fashion dozens of species of animal by engineering and forced evolution: a clade of radically different phenotypes that shared the same genome and filled every niche of the biome’s self-regulating ecosystem. After her sister-daughters had taken charge of the biome, Sri had begun to reshape herself.
She had altered and improved vacuum organisms designed by Avernus to capture sunlight and convert it into electrical energy. As they spread across the surface of Janus, Sri’s modified body grew ever larger. Copies of her original body were cached here and there in that great mass, each sharing the same sensory inputs, the same thoughts. They were all as alike as possible, true avatars ready to be sent out to explore the universe.
‘We will soon break out of this little moon and leave the Solar System and travel on towards Fomalhaut,’ Sri said. ‘It will take a thousand years, but we are capable of surviving voyages ten times as long. There is a ring of dust and protoplanetary debris around Fomalhaut, twice the size of our solar system. Millions of comets and planetoids and asteroids. Planets, too, but we don’t care about planets. We will fill the dust ring with copies of our clade, and some of those will move on to other systems where planets failed to form. We are the first true posthuman. A new species. The Outers were a first step, lungfish on the shore of space. We have already gone much further, and we will go further still.
‘From the point of view of the individual, evolution is cruel. For in the race to survive, all individuals perish. Most species perish. Only successful genes survive for any significant span of time. But the clade will split into a thousand or a million varieties, all different, yet all one flesh, one genome. We will fill the galaxy, in time. And we will never die.’
Alder laughed, and told his mother that he couldn’t fault her ambition.
‘You are not shocked by what I’ve told you,’ Sri said. Her ageless face floated calm and still in the avatar’s visor, like a medical specimen in a jar. ‘I’m glad. So very glad. Your acceptance means much to us.’
Alder remembered what Cash had said to him in the world above. ‘I’m your son. You made me what I am. Cut me with various talents and tweaks so that I could help you to get what you wanted. For a little while, we were a team - or so I believed. I didn’t even mind when you left me behind on Earth, because you had given me the responsibility of looking after the research facility. But in the years after the war, when you fell silent, I grew to hate and despise you. Because you had found something new, and had abandoned me for it. Because I realised that all along it was only your work that ever mattered to you. Well, I had my own work, and in time I had my own family too. You no longer had any power over me, and my hate ebbed away. But I never gave up on you. I sent you news about my family. I collected rumours about your work here on Janus, and sifted them for nuggets of truth. And now I know the truth, now I see what you’ve done, I know that I can let you go. I am amazed by it, yes. But I don’t approve of it. You were always remote from other people. Even from me, in the end. And now you’ve become a true monster. What you’ve accomplished is amazing, yes. But there’s something sad and desperate about it, because it seems to me that you’ve given up on other people. You have become a nation of one.’
‘You have your own family now. And I have mine, and it has me.’
‘When you arrive at Fomalhaut, you know, you might find other people already living there. What will you do then?’
Sri laughed. The pale children around them laughed too, a melodious but chilling carillon.
‘You are limited by old ways of thinking,’ Sri said. ‘We’re beyond that.’
‘We’ll see,’ Alder said.
He and his mother walked and talked. He told her about his family and his work on Earth. He told her about Avernus’s funeral, and the people he had met on Dione and Mimas. Sri said that she’d hoped that the old gene wizard would come back to the Saturn System before she died; they’d had so much to talk about.
‘But it was not to be,’ she said. ‘And I have discovered that it doesn’t matter. Because I know now that I am her equal. At least her equal. And we will go on, and do such things . . .’
‘Avernus has her place in history, and you have yours,’ Alder said.
He could not tell her that she was not now, nor could she ever be, Avernus’s equal. It would be too cruel. And besides, there would be no point. She would never acknowledge her faults because she was too proud, too vain. A monster of ego. As she always had been. She might live a thousand years, but she would never change. Never understand people. Like Berry, she had retreated from the world into her own fantasies. But at least Berry had Xbo Xbaine. Sri had only copies of herself.
At last they climbed a winding path to the meadow, and the cliff where the platform waited at the foot of its track.
‘We are glad you came,’ Sri said. ‘We have changed beyond your understanding, and we will continue to change. But we will never forget you.’
‘I don’t know if I will ever come here again,’ Alder said. ‘But I won’t say goodbye. We can still talk, you and I, whenever we want.’
But he knew that they wouldn’t, and he knew that she knew it too.
They made their farewells and the avatar stood still and silent amongst the crew of strange children as Alder stepped onto the platform and it rose up the cliff towards the mouth of the shaft. One flesh, one clade, one family. Dwindling below him, gone. The platform passed through the roof of the chamber and the leaves of the pressure barrier, climbing towards the black sky at the top of the shaft, where his friend was waiting.
2
Twelve years after the death of Avernus, Macy Minnot was still living on Titan, was still involved in the planoforming project. Currently, most of her time was taken up with a scheme to quicken the moon’s Hot Lakes. These occupied a string of fresh craters south of the hilly chaos of Xanadu, created by the impact of chunks of ice from the shield of the Ghost ship that had broken up while traversing the outer edge of Titan’s atmosphere during the crisis of ’31. Ice melted by the impacts had flooded the floors of the craters with ammonia-rich water. Now radiator grids powered by fission piles kept the lakes from freezing solid, and ecoengineers and gene wizards were seeding them with varieties of methanogenic bacteria and cyanobacteria, the first stage of the construction of a simple ecosystem of plankton, kelp, and several species of krill, shellfish, and crab.
When Newt came to pick her up, Macy was working with the nutrient-cycling crew at the research station beside the largest lake, Windermere Lacus. One of her assistants drove her up the steep slope, the lake stretching below, sheeted with brash ice and patched by fog smoking off leads of open water, to the landing pad where Newt’s aeroshell shuttle, painted the signature pink of his haulage company, sat like an orchid dropped in a coal cellar. Despite the string of fusion lamps in equatorial orbit and the ongoing injection of a layer of ultraviolet-absorbing chemicals high in the atmosphere to prevent formation of thiolins, the major component of the moon’s smoggy shroud, light levels at the surface of Titan were still relatively low. But the sun was clearly visible in the sky now, a tiny ruby in the dust, and so was Saturn, its crescent tipped sideways in the sky above the pale and restless fogs.
Macy and her assistant supervised the robot that unloaded pallets of insulated packages from the rolligon and slotted them inside the shuttle’s hold - all kinds of samples for her colleagues at the University of Athena, and for laboratories in a dozen research institutes and facilities on Earth. When the samples had been safely stowed, Macy climbed aboard and Newt took the shuttle straight up, punching through Titan’s sky and rendezvousing with the transit station, where Macy and Newt transferred themselves and their cargo to Elephant. They were on their way to the Sixtieth Conference on the Great Leap Up And Out, scheduled to be held in eight weeks at Athena, the Moon, but they took a roundabout route, via a comet falling towards Mars.
They had been partnered for more than thirty years. The edges of their relationship had long ago worn comfortably smooth and they had their own private shorthand and habits and accommodations that allowed them to rub along together during the voyage. Macy kept in touch with the research station at the Hot Lakes and the landscaping crew in the new city of Coleridge; Newt dealt with the snags and routine administration work generated by his haulage company, a little fleet of ships that connected Saturn and Jupiter and Mars in a shifting triangle, with a sideline in special deliveries and exotic cargoes. So the time passed equitably enough as Elephant fell inwards, rising above the plane of the ecliptic at a shallow angle as it crossed the orbit of Jupiter and the asteroid belt, until one day Newt pulled up a view of their destination in the memo space: a faint star off to one side of the tiny red disc of Mars.
Three days later, he took command of Elephant’s navigation and drive systems and flew the last ten thousand kilometres by eye and hand. The sun was eclipsed by the spinning sunshade that minimised thermal input - a circle of faint blue light expanding towards them, the comet nucleus at its centre acquiring heft and solidity. A fleck, a seed, a boulder, a small mountain. Elephant drifting past its pitted flanks towards the ship that kept station fifty kilometres ahead of it, silhouetted small and sharp against the sunshade’s oceanic glow.
The comet was a member of the short-term Jupiter family, a dirty snowball massing some thirty-two billion tonnes, its surface coated in layers of ice flakes and carbonaceous dust as fragile as cigarette ash, its interior a loose agglomeration of pebbly planetesimal material and water ice and pockets of frozen gases. As it fell sunwards, its orbit had been perturbed by judiciously creating hotspots that vented jets of gases and dust; in eighty-three days it would intercept Mars and break up above the surface, making a significant contribution to the partial pressure of the red planet’s atmosphere, currently thirty-two millibars at datum.
Newt’s company had won the delivery contract, and Newt and Macy’s youngest son, Darwin, was in charge of the crew that micro-managed the comet’s trajectory, countering changes in its delta vee caused by irregular outgassing as the pulse of thermal energy that had warmed the comet’s surface before the sunshade had been unfolded worked its way into the interior, and pockets of carbon dioxide or methane snow explosively sublimed. There was a small blow-out under way when Elephant sidled up to Darwin’s ship, a fountain jetting out sideways from the sunward end of the comet, dissipating outward for ten thousand kilometres. Darwin was busy organising a correction to the slight spin this had imparted, so his parents didn’t meet him and the rest of the crew until supper, some six hours later.
Macy hadn’t seen her son for more than a year. It was a small but pleasurable shock to be reminded of how much he looked like his father. A pale and lanky young man with a disordered crest of black hair, bright blue eyes, and a quick, lopsided smile, about the same age, twenty-five, that Newt had been when he’d helped Macy escape from East of Eden. And like Newt all those years ago, Darwin was trying to escape from the shadow of his parents’ reputation and find his own way in the world. He’d had some spectacular rows with them in the past, but he was happy to see them now and they had a fine time exchanging gossip about his siblings and discussing plans to use comets as the raw material for an ocean habitat wrapped around a rocky asteroid. Herding and dismantling the half-dozen comets needed to supply a sufficient volume of water created all kinds of complex and knotty problems, but Darwin reckoned that with the right backing it could be done within the next decade.