‘Lethe,’ Rusel said hoarsely. ‘You ugly bastard.’
‘You’re just jealous,’ Diluc said. ‘I’m sorry to wake you. But I just heard - you need to know—’
‘Know what?’
‘Blen showed up in the infirmary.’ Blen was the nanochemist assigned to Ship Three. ‘Get this: he has a heart murmur.’ Diluc’s grin returned.
Rusel frowned. ‘For that you woke me up? Poor Blen.’
‘It’s not that serious. But, Rus - it’s congenital.’
The sedative dulled Rusel’s thinking, and it took him a moment to figure it out.
The five Ships were to evacuate the last, brightest hopes of Port Sol from the path of the incoming peril, the forces of the young Coalition. But they were slower-than-light transports, and would take many centuries to reach their destinations. Only the healthiest, in body and genome, could be allowed aboard a generation starship. And if Blen had a hereditary heart condition—
‘He’s off the Ship,’ Rusel breathed.
‘And that means you’re aboard, brother. You’re the second-best nanochemist on this lump of ice. You won’t be here when the Coalition arrives. You’re going to live!’
Rusel lay back on his crushed pillow. He felt numb.
His brother kept talking. ‘Did you know that families are illegal under the Coalition? Their citizens are born in tanks. Just the fact of our relationship would doom us, Rus! I’m trying to fix a transfer from Five to Three. If we’re together, that’s something, isn’t it? I know it’s going to be hard, Rus. But we can help each other. We can get through this …’
All Rusel could think about was Lora, whom he would have to leave behind.
The next morning Rusel arranged to meet Lora in the Forest of Ancestors. He took a bubble-wheel surface transport, and set out early.
Port Sol was a planetesimal, an unfinished remnant of the formation of Sol system. Inhabited for millennia, its surface was heavily worked, quarried and pitted, and littered by abandoned towns. The Qax had never come here; Port Sol was a museum, some said, of pre-Occupation days. But throughout Port Sol’s long human usage some areas had been kept pristine, and as he drove Rusel kept to the marked track, to avoid crushing the delicate sculptures of frost that had coalesced here over four billion years.
And visible beyond the close horizon of the ice moon was a squat cylinder, a misty sketch in the faint sunlight. That was Ship Three, preparing for its leap into the greater dark.
This was the very edge of Sol system. The sky was a dome of stars, with the ragged glow of the Galaxy hurled casually across its equator. Set in that diffuse glow was the sun, the brightest star, bright enough to cast shadows, but so remote it was a mere pinpoint. Around the sun Rusel could make out a tiny puddle of light: the inner system, the disc of worlds, moons, asteroids, dust and other debris that had been the arena of all human history before the first interplanetary voyages some three thousand years earlier, and still the home of all but an invisible fraction of the human race. This was a time of turmoil, and today, invisible in that pale glow, humans were fighting and dying. And even now a punitive fleet was ploughing out of that warm centre, heading for Port Sol.
The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation of Earth from the alien Qax, just thirteen years earlier. The Interim Coalition of Governance, the new, ideologically pure and viciously determined central authority that had emerged from the chaos of a newly freed Earth, was already burning its way out through the worlds and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison camp on Earth or its Moon for ‘reconditioning’.
But if a world was found to be harbouring anyone who had collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties against it were much more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was ‘resurfacing’.
Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice moon was governed by five ‘pharaohs’, as they were called locally, an elite group who had indeed collaborated with the Qax - though they described it as ‘mediating the effects of the Occupation for the benefit of mankind’ - and they had received anti-ageing treatments as a reward. So Port Sol was a ‘nest of illegal immortals and collaborators’, the Coalition said, and dispatched its troops to ‘clean it out’. It seemed indifferent to the fact that, in addition to the pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.
The pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had had some warning of the coming of the Coalition. As the colonists had only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry - indeed the whole ice moon, a refuge from the Occupation, was somewhat low-tech - nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.
Five huge Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship, captained by a pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was as well. Between the stars there would be room to hide.
All these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.
Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.
In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs, inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the tent’s cool air, light as dreams.
Rusel told Lora his news.
Rusel was an able nanochemist, he was the right age for Ship crew, and his health and pedigree were immaculate. But unlike his brother he hadn’t been good enough to win the one-in-fifty lottery and make the cut to get a place on the Ships. He was twenty-eight years old: not a good age to die. But he had accepted his fate, so he believed - for Lora, his lover, had no hope of a berth. At twenty she was a student, a promising Virtual idealist but without the mature skills to have a chance of competing for a berth on the Ships. So at least he would be with her, when the sky fell in.
He was honest with himself, and unsentimental; he had never been sure if his noble serenity would have survived the appearance of the Coalition ships in Port Sol’s dark sky. And now, it seemed, he was never going to find out.
Lora was slim, delicate. The population of this low-gravity moon tended to tallness and thin bones, but Lora seemed to him more elfin than most, and she had large, dark eyes that always seemed a little unfocused, as if her attention was somewhere else. It was that sense of other-world fragility that had first attracted Rusel to her.
With blankets bundled over her legs, she took his hand and smiled. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘I’m the one who’s going to live. Why should I be afraid?’
‘You’d accepted dying. Now you’ve got to get used to the idea of living.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just as hard.’
‘And living without you.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Maybe that’s what scares me most. I’m frightened of losing you.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
He gazed out at the silent, watchful shapes of the Ancestors. These ‘trees’, some three or four metres high, were stumps with ‘roots’ that dug into the icy ground. They were living things, the most advanced members of Port Sol’s low-temperature aboriginal ecology. This was their sessile stage. In their youth, these creatures, called ‘Toolmakers’, were mobile, and were actually intelligent. They would haul themselves across Port Sol’s broken ground, seeking a suitable crater slope or ridge face. There they would set down their roots and allow their nervous systems and their minds to dissolve, their purposes fulfilled.
Rusel wondered what liquid-helium dreams might be coursing slowly through the Ancestors’ residual minds. They were beyond decisions now; in a way he envied them.
‘Maybe the Coalition will spare the Ancestors.’
She snorted. ‘I doubt it. The Coalition only care about humans - and their sort of humans at that.’
‘My family has lived here a long time,’ he said. ‘There’s a story that says we rode out with the first colonising wave.’ It was a legendary time, when the engineer Michael Poole had come barnstorming all the way through the system to Port Sol to build his great starships.
She smiled. ‘Most families have stories like that. After thousands of years, who can tell?’
‘This is my home,’ he blurted. ‘This isn’t just the destruction of us, but of our culture, our heritage. Everything we’ve worked for.’
‘But that’s why you’re so important.’ She sat up, letting the blanket fall away, and wrapped her arms around his neck. In Sol’s dim light her eyes were pools of liquid darkness. ‘You’re the future. The pharaohs say that in the long run the Coalition will be the death of mankind, not just of us. Somebody has to save our knowledge, our values, for the future.’
‘But you—’ You will be alone, when the Coalition ships descend. Decision sparked. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
She pulled back. ‘What?’
‘I’ve decided. I’ll tell Pharaoh Andres, and my brother. I can’t leave here, not without you.’
‘You must,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re the best for the job, believe me; if not the pharaohs wouldn’t have selected you. So you have to go. It’s your duty.’
‘What human being would run out on those he loved?’
Her face was set, and she sounded much older than her twenty years. ‘It would be easier to die. But you must live, live on and on, live on like a machine, until the job is done, and the race is saved.’
Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his face in the soft warmth of her neck.
Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He determined to cherish every minute.
But as it turned out they had much less time than that.
Once again he was woken in the dark. But this time his room lights were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled, his system heavy with sedative.
‘—thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three. Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there in thirty minutes, twenty-nine forty-five, we leave without you.’
At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.
‘Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have twenty-nine minutes to get to—’
She had made a mistake: that was his first thought. Had she forgotten that there were still sixteen days to go before the Coalition ships were due? But he could see from her face there was no mistake.
Twenty-nine minutes. He reached down to his bedside cabinet, pulled out a nano pill and gulped it down dry. Reality bleached, becoming cold and stark.
He dragged on his skinsuit and sealed it roughly. He glanced around his room, at his bed, his few pieces of furniture, the Virtual unit on the dresser with its images of Lora. Bring nothing. Andres wasn’t a woman you disobeyed in the slightest particular.
Without looking back he left the room.
The corridor outside was bedlam. A thousand people shared this under-the-ice habitat, and all of them seemed to be out tonight. They ran this way and that, many in skinsuits, some hauling bundles of gear. He pushed his way through the throng. The sense of panic was tangible - and, carried on the recycled air, he thought he could smell burning.
His heart sank. It was obviously a scramble to escape - but the only way off the moon was the Ships, which could take no more than a thousand. Had the sudden curtailing of the time left triggered this panic? In this ultimate emergency had the citizens of Port Sol lost all their values, all their sense of community? What could they hope to achieve by hurling themselves at Ships that had no room for them, but to bring everybody down with them? But what would I do? He could afford the luxury of nobility; he was getting out of here.
Twenty minutes.
He reached the perimeter concourse. Here, surface transports nuzzled against a row of simple airlocks. Some of the locks were already open, and people were crowding in, pushing children, bundles of luggage. His own car was still here, he saw with relief. He pulled open his skinsuit glove and hastily pressed his palm to the wall. The door hissed open.
But before he could pass through, somebody grabbed his arm.
A man faced him, a stranger, short, burly, aged perhaps forty. Behind him a woman clutched a small child and an infant. The adults had blanket-wrapped bundles on their backs. The man wore an electric-blue skinsuit, but his family were in hab clothes.