The Dark Reaches (13 page)

“Some one of your own pilots,” Iain said.

“I suspect not,” Hiso said frankly. “There are—other inhabited places in the Earth system. A few jump pilots who are not under my command. Perhaps it was one of them. Tereu has—connections with some of those people, and I will request that she pursue that question.”

Linnea had no trouble guessing Hiso’s thoughts:
If this is real, it’s a weapon.
And he would want it for his own pilots. Controlled, refined, made to carry words or commands, it would give an advantage against the Cold Minds; multiple ships could maneuver together in otherspace, perhaps, or carry out a coordinated attack—things that had never been possible before. She guessed from Iain’s troubled expression that this realization was just now coming to him. He had resisted the idea that such communication was even possible for so long that he’d never thought it through.

Well, she had. “I believe that we would all benefit from an exchange of ideas,” she said. “A discussion of tactics that have served us both.” She kept her voice neutral, her expression noncommittal, but she watched Hiso carefully. “We’ve had some success in our skirmishes with the Cold Minds. And you—your people have survived in this system for a very long time.”

Linnea saw Hiso’s face smooth out under bland self-control. “You may not yet grasp our great distance from the sun, Pilot Kiaho. There’s little energy here for the Cold Minds to exploit; the solar flux is a thousandth of what it is at Earth. We have no resources the Cold Minds can’t obtain more easily in the warm inner worlds—which they utterly control.”

Linnea studied Hiso.
There is definitely something you don’t want to tell us, my brother pilot.

But she took her cue from Iain’s restraint.
Don’t push. Not yet.
For a wild moment she considered asking Tereu about blue flowers. But no, she would dance this dance, follow Iain’s lead; these people were much more his than hers. She smiled pleasantly at Hiso. “Iain and I look forward to learning more about your achievements here.”

She was watching, and she saw Hiso’s bland mask slip, revealing a flicker of anger, gone almost at once. And at the same moment, beyond Hiso, she saw that Tereu, too, was watching him—and her eyes showed a deep wariness.

Linnea smiled at Hiso.
So you are dangerous.

 

 

 

After Hiso had departed with another exchange of courtesies and assurances, two of Tereu’s staff of scholars—a man and a woman, both gray-haired and black-clad—conducted Iain and Linnea on what was to be a brief tour of the Triton outpost. Tereu waved them all off with a smile; apparently she had no intention of leaving her comfortable seclusion to continue as their guide and host. After the first few minutes with the scholars, Linnea began to understand why.

They went on foot—trailed at a distance by two of Tereu’s men—through the little park that surrounded the residence, then along a high-arched main corridor. This one was walled with gleaming polished metal, lined with the ever-present stunted trees in pots, set meticulously every ten meters along each wall.

“This is spacious,” Iain said.

“The city has grown over the centuries,” the woman, Cleopa, said with clear pride. “Do you know, Pilot sen Paolo—one can walk three kilometers without ever passing through the same corridor twice?”

Iain shook his head as if in amazement.

“There are slideways,” Cleopa said, “and a few dedicated shafts with shuttle cars; but in general, you see, our design encourages regular exercise.”

“And yet no one seems to be out walking,” Linnea said. This was a radial corridor, leading straight out from Tereu’s residence at the center of the city, and Linnea could see far ahead: The wide corridor was empty. She’d lived on orbital stations. There, people were everywhere, pursuing their work, their leisure, their business, the corridors always crowded. Yet here the four of them walked in a shell of emptiness. Much like the one in which Tereu lived, Linnea reflected—in her small, perfect residence in its domed circle of garden. “Is there any public gathering place we could visit?” Linnea asked. “Maybe a market?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Pilot Kiaho.” The gray-haired man who had called himself Scholar Natan smiled thinly. “There are no scheduled gatherings for sport today, and as for markets—we distribute goods rationally here, you see. We have no need to buy and sell among ourselves.”

“No, not among ourselves,” Cleopa said. She had fallen into step beside Linnea. “But there is always the deepsiders’ market—”

“Which is not open today,” Natan said repressively. There was an awkward silence. They all kept walking.

“What are deepsiders?” Iain asked.

“Deepsiders are people who live and work in space,” Natan said, with a twist of contempt in his voice that made Iain lift an eyebrow. “A diminishing population, without the vigor of Tritoner stock. We allow them to trade with us, when one of their carrier ships is in. But that does not happen to be the case today.”

“But it will be tomorrow,” Cleopa said, with a glance at Linnea.

“Deepsiders are of no interest,” Natan said, repressive again. “You must have something similar in the Hidden Worlds. People who wander from asteroid to asteroid, mining.” Linnea wondered at the hostility in his voice. “They scavenge what they can to sell to us, and they manufacture in zero gee what we cannot here on the surface. They’re not like us,” he said vigorously. “They live in chaotic, smelly habitats, they move randomly from place to place—and their social customs are shocking.”

Linnea’s eyes met Iain’s. “They sound interesting,” Linnea said, and looked away from Iain’s grin. “A different culture. And I understand that they, too, have jump pilots.”

“They do,” Cleopa said, with an unfriendly glance at Natan. “A few jumpships, in constant use. You must understand—they live in widely scattered places. It takes years for one of their ore carriers from the Trojan asteroids to reach our orbit. Rocks have the patience for such a journey. But people do not.”

“Perhaps the Hidden Worlds never had any need for deepsiders,” Natan said. He sniffed. “You don’t have to
trade
for water and ammonia and nitrogen. You don’t have to
buy
metal, just dig where you stand! Dig here on Triton, and it’s ice for hundreds of meters down.”

“Deepsiders interest me,” Linnea said, catching Cleopa’s eye.
Deepsiders, and deepsider pilots.
“Iain and I would like very much to meet some of them. Perhaps we could visit their market tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid it would be too difficult to arrange for your safety on such short notice,” Natan said.

“But we’ve come so far,” Linnea murmured, allowing regret to inform her tone. And at that moment she caught a glimmer of humor in Cleopa’s eyes. “It seems a shame.” She ignored Iain’s exasperated expression.

“Perhaps
I
can arrange it,” Cleopa said. “After all, Triton is extremely safe. You were telling Madame Tereu only last week, Scholar Natan, how you rejoiced at the fact that a child might walk alone from the refinery quarter to the Palace of Sport . . . ?”

Natan reddened. “There is no need for our guests to visit the actual market. If you are curious about deepsiders, Pilot Kiaho, we can provide educational recordings that—”

“Scholar Natan,” Cleopa said blandly, “you’ll give our guests the impression that we have something to hide.” She slid her arm through his. “I know
you
can arrange this. I know you wouldn’t wish to disappoint
these
guests.”

Linnea caught Iain’s wondering glance, but they both kept silent.
Deepsiders.
Linnea had stumbled onto something important. But she could not yet guess what.

Natan stared at his colleague for a moment. Then nodded with obvious reluctance. “If our guests insist, and if Madame Tereu agrees, I’ll do my best to arrange the visit.”

They had reached their first destination, which turned out to be a school. In a vividly lit assembly hall, walled in pale green tile and gray metal, perhaps a hundred children knelt, waiting in neat rows on the black plastic floor—girls in clean gray dresses, boys in black trousers and neatly fitting white shirts. The children rose gracefully to their feet, all at once, as Linnea, Iain, and the scholars entered.

A row of pretty, exquisitely tidy little girls stepped forward and sang a welcome song whose words Linnea could not quite follow: words about warmth, and shielding, and the ever-bright light of watchfulness—whatever that meant. A large picture of Tereu, more cheerful than the official portraits in the corridors, smiled down on them all from one wall.

A thin, nervous boy made a speech, his words coming so rapidly that Linnea was helpless to follow them. Then there was another song, about how the minstrel boy to the war had gone, and how his songs were made for the pure and free. And the visit was over.

“There were almost as many teachers as students,” Iain remarked, as they left the school corridor.

“We don’t have very many children,” Cleopa said, with a note of sadness in her voice. “The radiation here—it’s more than is quite—safe.” She glanced at Linnea. “Have you had any children yet?”

“We’re at war,” Linnea said steadily. “So that is a decision I’m not free to make.” This was not a matter she’d ever yet chosen to speak of; certainly not with strangers.

“You
choose
not to have children,” Natan said, with a puzzled glance at Iain, who showed no expression. “Interesting. Do you see, among our people—we never refuse the gift, if it comes to us. So many couples are sterile.”

“Can’t you match fertile people?” Iain asked. “At least to produce children?”

Natan looked shocked. “That’s deepsider thinking.” He shook his head. “We would lose too much. Social order. The bond of family. The foundation of our strength.” He stopped, with obvious relief, in front of a series of sliding metal doors. “The shuttle to the industrial section.” He touched a metal door in front of them. It slid aside, revealing the car, without seats but lined with metal bars reaching from floor to ceiling.

Linnea stood close to Iain as the car started up. As she’d suspected, the acceleration of its motion was so much greater than the weak gravity that she had to brace her feet against the bar as well as gripping it with her hands. As the car careened around a curve, Iain’s arm slid around her waist and steadied her, and she leaned gratefully into his warm strength. No one else seemed to feel the cold as she did.

Natan was droning on about nitrogen geysers, the local stability of the crust. “We mine water, and extract ammonia; and there’s a region a few kilometers away where we’ve blasted away the frozen nitrogen and are mining or ganics, mostly short-chain.” Natan lifted his chin. “It’s reduced our dependency on the deepsiders—we are no longer forced to buy what they mine out of the eccentric chon drites.”

“By which my colleague means asteroids,” Cleopa said to Linnea. “Asteroids with carbon in them. Scholar Natan talks like that all the time, I fear.” As she was speaking, the car came to a slow, gentle halt, and the door slid open. “Here we are.”

The high, cold spaces of the industrial section, smelling faintly of ammonia, were a complicated maze of pipes and storage tanks and pumps, big sealed propane burners, chemical processing. Men in sealed suits and respirators glided past on small carts, anonymous behind plastic visors. “You built all this after Earth fell?” Iain marveled.

“Much of it was already here,” Cleopa said.

Natan gave her a cold glance, then turned to Linnea. “The deepsiders had been out here for years already, you see, setting up an immense project to collect helium-3 from Neptune’s atmosphere and ship it back to Earth as fuel for the vast fusion plants they were starting to build, right at the end of—before the Cold Minds. A glorious time in Earth’s history, one that—” He caught Cleopa’s eye and hurried on. “Well, there was no need for the fuel once Earth was lost; and our ancestors needed shelter. The abandoned project left plenty of material and equipment for us all, here on Triton and in Neptune’s orbit.”

“And so we pushed the deepsiders off Triton,” Cleopa said.

“It was a reasonable division of resources,” Natan said. “Deepsiders prefer space; we prefer gravity. Deepsiders complain when they come here, you know. Eight percent gee, and they complain.”

“I have a deepsider cousin who comes here often,” Cleopa said. “She rarely complains.”

Natan moved away abruptly to stand beside Iain, who was looking through a viewing window at an array of tanks and pipes that meant nothing to Linnea. Cleopa lingered beside her.

“Natan thinks I should be more ashamed of my cousin.” Cleopa said with a grin. “My cousin says it’s not the gee that bothers her—it’s everything moving in the same direction when she lets go of it.”

“I look forward to meeting some deepsiders for myself,” Linnea said, smiling back at her.

“Let me give you my cousin’s name and family code—in case you should need it,” Cleopa said. She pulled a notebook out of one of the capacious pockets of her robe, scribbled a few words on the corner of a page, tore it off, and pressed it into Linnea’s hand.” “Keep that safe,” she said in a low voice. “Look at it later.”

Linnea blinked at her, but it was too late for questions; Natan and Iain had turned away from whatever it was that had fascinated Iain. Linnea slipped the scrap of paper into her own pocket and smiled her thanks to Cleopa.

“I think,” Natan said as he reached the two women, “that this has been a long enough day for our two guests. Madame Tereu will be concerned if it should prove we’ve overtired them. I suggest that we return to the city at once.”

“As you instruct, of course, Scholar Natan,” Cleopa said calmly. She did not look at Linnea.

And Linnea did not look at Iain. She kept her hand in her pocket, her fingers on the scrap of paper that might be her first clue to the answers she sought.