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“That is what the System believes,” Ida said. “Is that not what you believe?”

“It has proved itself true,” said Milla Ivanov.

Ida leaned on her elbows.

“Come now,” she said. “Tell me what you think, Doctor Ivanov.”

One white eyebrow arched up.

“I wish that my son had stayed on Earth,” Milla said. “I wish that Leon had lived a peaceful, safe, successful life in harmony with the System instead of being hunted down like an animal.”

It was spoken with what sounded like honesty, or at least as much honesty as so cold a woman could display, but it was exactly what Milla Ivanov was supposed to say, and so Ida waited a moment longer, searching Milla's face for a lie that was not there to see.

“Did you ever notice any signs,” Ida asked, “when your son was living with you that he might be taking after his father?”

A brief silence.

“His father was also occasionally stricken with melancholy,” said Milla in what could only be a deliberate misunderstanding of Ida's question.

Ida gave her a condescending smile. She expected that to annoy Doctor Ivanov, but if it did, she could not see it. “I meant delinquent behavior.”

“No,” Milla said. “I noticed nothing.”

“And how about revolutionary sympathies?”

“My son never took after his father that way,” said Milla, her words very short, very clipped.

Ida lowered her tone.

“He has told me,” she said, “about how he was taken to see Saturn when he was very young. About how deeply that upset him.”

Milla's gaze was boring holes through her skull.

“Did you never realize,” Ida asked with a delicate lance of disbelief in her voice, “that he felt so bad for them? That he didn't truly appreciate the necessity of the System's decision? Did you truly never notice that he blamed the System, in the smallest of measures, for the atrocities he saw?”

“As I said,” Milla Ivanov told her, “my son is very good at hiding his thoughts, even from me.”

Ida made a show of hesitation, of thinking, and then spoke as if she were sharing information that she was supposed to keep to herself. “The System has great reason to believe that your son is involved in revolutionary activities.” All of Milla's attention was visibly on Ida, but her face remained impassive. Ida said, “Once this comes to light, it will call into question certain aspects of your parenting and your obedience to the System.”

“It may be questioned,” Milla said. “The answers will remain as they have been for thirty years.”

“And if signs are found that you failed to recognize at the time…”

“Signs of what? There were no ‘signs,' Miss Stays. And my son would not be so foolish as to involve himself in any revolutionary activity.”

“No?”

“No,” said Milla. “Leon is individualistic. To be in a revolution requires a loss of the self to something more. My son would not be able to tolerate such a thing.”

“Doctor Ivanov, we have evidence…”

“Then you have misread it,” said Milla Ivanov. “Perhaps you are simply wrong, Miss Stays.”

For a long moment Ida sat perfectly still.

Then she said, “For seven years you did not have the faintest idea that your husband, the man with whom you shared a house, a name, and a bed, was involved in attempting to sever the Saturnian system from the solar system. Your husband was attempting to pull off the largest rebellion in the past two hundred years. And you did not have the faintest inkling of what he was doing.”

Milla Ivanov said nothing.

“And you would have me believe,” said Ida, “that a woman so
intelligent
as you, so
adaptive,
wouldn't learn to keep an eye on the kind of signs that she claims to have missed in her husband? You would have me believe that you would not be on your guard for them to appear in your own son?”

Milla Ivanov's expression was as cold as the far reaches of space, where the sun was just a star, colder than ice, as cold as the hollowness of the void. Ida said, “Or is this one more instance of such convenient ignorance?”

In the silence that followed, only the distant groans of machinery could be heard. And in that silence Milla spoke.

“Let me explain to you what you are,” she said. “You are but one in a long line of interrogators to think you can make your name by unmaking me. You are nothing more than a gear in a machine I am well familiar with, and you are saying and asking the same things I have been told and asked for thirty years. The System has only ever proved my innocence. Do you think to succeed where thirty years of others have failed?”

Ida stayed frozen in place, conscious of the way that without moving, by speaking only just loudly enough to be heard, Milla Ivanov had taken the power of the situation from her.

Milla said, “I assumed that this interrogation had some relevance and was not intended to discuss thirty-year-old rumors.”

For a moment Ida wanted, with keen desire, to tear apart Milla's son before the mother's eyes.

It was only the thought that eventually she would destroy Ivan that gave her the strength to continue the interrogation.

Hallway, hallway, hallway; control room, hallway; the very end of the hallway, the very base of the ship's spine; hallway, a room where Ida Stays sat across from white-haired Milla Ivanov. Althea paused in her flipping through the working cameras' feeds to watch just for a moment.

She flipped away.

Hallway, hallway, storage room; hallway, the core with its rays of plasma arching away from its dark heart, hallway, the white room—

Althea flipped back immediately. The cameras in the white room had not been working before. For an instant she saw the scene from high above: Ivan sitting pale and chained in place and Gagnon leaning over the table saying something to him.

It took the sound a moment to catch up with the video. Gagnon was saying, “…her alone.”

“I'm not doing anything,” Ivan said with precision, and an angle to his jaw that spoke of defiance.

“You've been talking to her,” said Gagnon.

“And is it a crime to talk?”

“I want you to leave Althea Bastet alone.”

“And if I say no? What, will you tell
Ida
?”

Althea's heart jolted under a sudden rush of adrenaline, but Gagnon seemed to realize that he couldn't tell Ida, either. “I'll keep you away from her,” he threatened.

Ivan laughed, and Althea realized how small and how weak Gagnon's threat had been; it was not even a threat, nothing more than a protective impulse. Her humiliation and her anger that Gagnon would talk to Ivan about her were humbled in the face of that impulse, and she knew that she could not possibly confront Gagnon about it.

“Go ahead,” Ivan said. “Try to chain me up some more.”

Althea would have listened longer, but the feed abruptly cut out, and she could not bring it back again.

It did confirm one thing, at least. The computer was receiving the feeds from the nonfunctional cameras. It simply wasn't sharing them with her. She also suspected that from now on she would find herself scheduled for shifts that coincided with times when Ivan was being interrogated so that she could not guard his door while she worked.

She was not certain whether she was relieved or disappointed.

To her right, on the wall against the door, the perpetual System broadcast was playing.

This time it was a man on the screen. He was handsome, but he did not have blue eyes.

“At 200 Earth Standard Time this morning, System forces suppressed another destructive riot on the Neptunian moon Galatea, restoring order,” the subtitles read while his lips moved soundlessly above. Althea did not need the sound on the display to be on to hear his Terran accent. “The gathering began as an apparent protest regarding System efforts to supplement the moon's agricultural output.”

The screen changed to a grainy surveillance camera view of the riot. On the dirty ice surface of Galatea, barren and gray, people crowded together, shouting and wild. They looked vicious. They looked dangerous. The camera cut back shortly to the handsome man, the image having lasted only long enough for anyone watching the news to witness the violence of the rabble, its inhumanity.

“Its true nature as a terrorist plot became apparent when the mob attacked the residence of System Governor Enrico Boltzmann, a decorated servant of the System, and murdered him in his home. After his death, the System intervened, ending the hostilities with a blow to the greenhouse enclosure.”

A blow to the greenhouse enclosure meant breaking the enclosure, allowing the trapped atmosphere and heat to rush out, suffocating the rioters in the sudden thinness of the air. Althea swallowed and did her best not to show what else she thought. The camera in the piloting room was still operational and broadcasting Althea's image live to the System.

“The System suspects that this riot was also instigated by the Mallt-y-Nos, as with the riots on Titania, which are still being subdued,” said the handsome man, whose eyes were as blank as those of the other newscaster, as guarded as Ivanov's had been in the picture in his file. “But rest assured, the System will do anything to protect its citizens.”

Althea turned away. She no longer wanted to look at the earthscape behind the newscaster's head, the verdant greens of Earth, the perfect blue of its sky unenclosed by any greenhouse. She turned back to the
Ananke
and flipped through the working camera feeds one last time, pausing on the tableau of Milla Ivanov, seated like her son, with Ida leaning on the table across from her.

Althea closed the program, but she could not stop herself from thinking.

“Where are we going?” Milla asked as Ida gestured for her to walk with her down the hall, farther away from the docking bay.

“We have one more stop to make.”

Nothing Milla had said had caught Ida's attention. She would check it all, of course, but everything seemed to be in order: Milla's story seemed true. In any case, whether she could have Milla Ivanov arrested was less important than here, than now. Ida wondered what Milla's reaction to her son in chains would be, if that at last would draw something from the doctor.

Ida wondered how Ivan would change when he saw his mother.

When they reached the doorway to the white room, Milla Ivanov stopped. “My son is in there,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” Ida said. She pushed open the door.

Domitian was standing beside the table in the precise center of the vast, bright room, a few steps away from the figure in the chair. The chains on Ivan's arms were visible even from the door, and the cloth of his shirt was so thin that it fell loosely and followed the shape of his body, as if he were exposed, uncovered, trapped, and vulnerable. His back was toward the door.

Without a word, Milla Ivanov headed for the table and her son. Ida followed, the sound of her heels ringing out, filling the vast empty space with echoes.

Ivan said, “Ida?”

“No,” said his mother in her quiet voice, and Ivan jerked his head around just as she stepped into the range of his vision.

For a long moment mother and son simply looked at each other.

Ivan, Ida saw, was afraid, and while Milla Ivanov looked at him—at the dark shadows beneath his eyes, at the chains around his wrists—her jaw grew tight. Their focus on each other was so complete that it was as if Ida and Domitian were not in the room at all.

Ivan said, “They brought you all the way out here?”

“Apparently,” Milla said, “they had some questions for me that couldn't possibly be answered at an outside facility.”

A moment of grim understanding passed between the Ivanovs. If Ida had not had to school her expression, she would have smiled.

Milla Ivanov shifted position, the first overt display of discomfort Ida had seen on her, crossing her arms across her chest and drumming her fingers without rhythm on the sleeve of her jacket. Her customary nervous tic.

“How are you doing?” Milla asked abruptly.

“Great,” said Ivan, with a special sort of sarcasm that did not seem to know whether it wanted to be sarcastic. “Really fantastic. How about you?”

“Very well,” said Milla. “I got tenure.”

“That's good.”

What Milla's ironclad accounting of her movements had not done to convince Ida that mother and son had not spoken in ten years, witnessing the stilted and awkward nature of this interaction was doing. They truly had not been in contact, at least not for a long time.

“Did you miss me?” Ivan asked. His fingers were twitching against the arms of his chair.

“No.” Milla paused. “I got a dog.”

After a beat, Ivan grinned. It was not like the smiles Ida had seen him direct her way. This was the kind of smile she saw directed at Matthew Gale in the surveillance footage she had watched: wide, honest, as bright and brilliant as his eyes. At the sight of that smile, Milla's expression softened, but Ida thought she was rather close to weeping.

“I wish you could've met Constance,” Ivan said, his grin fading away. “You would've liked her, Mom.”

Milla let out a breath and looked away, in the opposite direction from Ida and Domitian; when she turned her head back, her eyes were dry but she might as well have let herself weep, because Ida could see the grief on her face.

“I take it she was your girlfriend?” Milla asked.

“She was,” Ivan answered. He was being perfectly serious when he said, “You and she would have had a lot in common.”

Milla nodded very slightly, her fingers still tapping against her arm. It was convenient that Ivan had brought up Constance, Ida thought; it would lend weight to the meeting Ida had arranged.

This time the silence stretched out almost unbearably. Mother and son no longer met each other's eyes. Ivan stared instead at the drumming of his mother's fingers.