“One would hope that after all this time the Terran nation-states would have learned from experience and made their reconciliations with each other, such that their various ties with the off-planet settlements were consistent and coherent, and all the confusion and discord that their current actions create been dispensed with. But no. They have not managed that. It may take them decades more, or even centuries. No one can say how Earth will go. Meanwhile, we have to restore some kind of relationship with our old patron Mars. The work around Saturn began as a Martian nitrogen hunt, as you know, and that was a big part of settling the Saturn system in the first place. So the complete break from Mars, while necessary in its time, does not have to stay permanent, nor should it. We’re strong enough now that we can deal with Mars without being overwhelmed by them. Indeed, to engage them would be a sign of strength for us. So I propose that we go there and arrange to renew nitrogen exports from Titan to them, almost at the levels that existed before, but in a new arrangement that we control, in essence a fair trade. It would benefit both planets. The Titanic atmosphere still holds about twice as much nitrogen as we want it to have in the preferred state. That suggests a specific transfer quantity that we can set the conditions for. In return we can provide our part of a triangular trade: nitrogen from Titan to Mars, reconstruction and development assistance from Mars to Mercury, and heavy metals and rare earths from Mercury to Saturn. Also their help in assuring the Vulcan light imports.”
Questions and such from his interlocutors. Discussion. Then Wahram again:
“The reinforcement of ties in all three directions would be helpful in the effort to band together in the face of Earth’s recidivist imperialism, and their internal conflicts and rivalries, which threaten to spill outward and overrun all of us. We might even help to heal some of these old problems. It would be a way of following up on the reanimation, which has produced such remarkable effects already.”
“Like what?” He was challenged.
“The Arctic League has become one of the most progressive and cooperative political organizations on Earth. The middle of North America is being repopulated as a buffalo grasslands to tremendous acclaim. The Amazonian rain forest is being expanded back into its full historical basin, now tended as parkland, somewhat as it was in the pre-Columbian period. Southeast Asia, South Asia have achieved population balance and the biggest rewilding of all, which has helped their forests, water, and climate situation. These are all measurably improved situations since the reanimation occurred.”
“There hasn’t been anywhere near enough time to make those conclusions. The animal invasion is often described as a horrid botch that created a host of nightmare problems.”
“Wrongly so.”
They wrangled about the situation on Earth for a while. Finally the senior advisor from the Saturn Administrative Group reminded them that the issue on the table was the creation of a three-way trade with Mars and Mercury. Wahram pointed out that Mars had been considerably influenced and one might say infected by the qube humanoids that had infiltrated their system and only recently been ferreted out and sent into exile; the Martians were so pleased to be rid of them that they were revoking Jean Genette’s exile status and welcoming the now-celebrated inspector back home to be thanked for good service. Presumably the new dispensation there on Mars would include a more cooperative spirit. Many council members nodded at this good news, and they got down to details of quantities of nitrogen transport, schedules, and compensation. The ultimate millibar pressure of the Titanic atmosphere was debated.
Wahram waited until most of the people in the room were feeling impatient about the matter, then called for a return to the question at hand. The principle of the proposal was approved by consensus and they closed the meeting.
The last question had to do with how they would proceed to convey their agreement to their partners, and Wahram said, “I am going to Mercury to propose marriage to Swan Er Hong. I hope we will take vows at the epithalamion on Olympus Mons. So we will be able to speak to the right people on Mars at that time.”
Ah, good, they all said. Congratulations. Some looked surprised; others nodded knowingly. That will make it all easier. You’ll make something like a Saturn-Mercury standing committee.
Yes, Wahram said.
SWAN
Swan left Earth feeling considerably pleased with herself for helping the qubical person light out for the territory, and pleased with Zasha too, which mattered to her much more than she had realized it would. She took the space elevator up from Quito and lived through the performance of Satyagraha yet again, and this time it was the peace of the final movement that struck her most, the scale rising in its simple octave over and over, like a meditation chant to lift you right off your feet; and dancing in the ever-lightening g near the end made it a very physical feeling, a kind of euphoria as they were lifted on wings of song.
She returned to Mercury in a terrarium called the Henry David. It was a classic New Englander, with a few small clapboard villages and some pasturage breaking up a hardwood and conifer mixed forest. It was October there, and the maples had gone red, so that there were trees violently yellow, orange, red, and green, all mixed and scattered together over the inside of the cylinder, such that when you looked up at it overhead, it appeared to be a speechless speech in some kind of round color language, trembling on the edge of meaning. Swan wandered through the forest on paths, went from one cleared hilltop to another. One day she took up leaves that had fallen and arranged them across a clearing so that they went from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green, in a smooth progression. This colored line on the land pleased her greatly, as did the wind that blew it away. Another day she spent hours following a black bear and her cub. In the afternoon they came to an abandoned apple orchard, where one ancient crippled tree had nevertheless produced a lot of apples, so many that some branches drooped to the ground. The bears ate a ton of them. There was an upright half barrel next to the tree that had filled with rainwater, and the cub climbed into it and took a bath, its glossy fur going black and pointing in wet tips.
Back on Mercury she settled into her life in Terminator. She woke out on her balcony, breakfasted in the morning cool, did her stretches to the sun, bowing uneasily to Sol Invictus. Looked over the city, registering all the familiar landmarks that had been rebuilt, and the new trees and shrubs, looking a little bigger every day, a little more in place. She had taken a postcard that Alex had had couriered to her long before, and tacked it to the wall over her kitchen sink, where Alex’s handwriting proclaimed daily:
O joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!
It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,
I will have thousands of globes and all time.
It was autumn now in Terminator too, and the row of Japanese fire maples on the terrace two down from her balcony had gone an incandescent red. Dust had settled on the royal-blue roof tiles she could see below. The new weather program seemed to include more windy days than the old one had, and sometimes there were winds stronger than any she could remember. She liked that. Certain cold gusty winds would pull her loose from whatever she was doing and take her on long walks around the city. It was feeling very much bigger up front than before, the platform extended to provide more park and farm. There were new canals in the flat part of the city and the park. Bridges over canals, bike paths, broad boulevards and esplanades. Her town. Same but different. It occurred to her that the city could be expanded forward even farther into the night; in theory, as the decades and centuries passed they could cover the tracks westward all the way around the nightside of Mercury.
She spent most of her days out in the farm, working on the pond and wetlands. The new estuary was not thriving and there were questions about salinity levels, and a little hydraulic tide they had going. Arguments, really. And she was still trying to understand why the Gibraltar apes didn’t like the caves they had provided in a little hill with a west-facing cliff
face. The apes were gorgeous, and usually they didn’t have problems the way people had problems. But there they were, hanging out on the flats under the caves, unwilling to go into them. At some point she might have to climb up there to take a look herself.
While she was out there watching the apes, she thought about her life. Here she was, 137 years old. Body much abused the whole time; it would not last forever, or even necessarily go on much longer. On the other hand, the treatments were doing new things even compared to a few years before, and people were still working at improving them. Mqaret was almost two hundred. So it had to be thought about.
Her close relationships were few, and perhaps no longer so close. She had everything she needed; her life was good. Her surviving child was out there somewhere, living her life in her own manner, not cratering to speak of. Occasionally in touch. Not the issue. Swan was closer to other people, and that was all right. Her young friend Kiran had stayed on Venus, had insisted on it, and was back in the thick of things there and sending her reports on a regular basis. It felt like more of a relationship than many she had, and there were more like that out there to come, no doubt; people were always grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into their lives, it seemed. Her farm crew was tight. She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary? Because now, with Alex gone, though she talked to many people, in the end she was missing someone to tell things to in the way she had always told Alex.
Oh I miss you Hettie Moore
But there’s no one here left to tell—
The world has gone black before my eyes.
In the farm by herself she sang the old ballad, and wondered what would make things right. Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that.
No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape—some place for people to live in for ages to come—then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.
But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with. Alex had been pleased with her.
She had seen the traveling isolatoes, solitary old spacers who made their own way in the world, who were not partnered in any fashion with other people. That was her crowd; she had been one of them herself for more than half her life. Had they all been on the hunt? She recalled something she had heard people say: I want to meet somebody. Meet; they meant “mate.” I want to mate somebody. “Meet” was the future subjunctive of “mate,” in the mood of desire. And when you looked around, you saw it: pair-bonding kept coming back. It was a future conditional tense, a subjunctive verb: to mate somebody, and then meet them. It was an atavistic thing, as if they were swans, or some other creature with a genetic urge to pair off. “Swan is not a swan,” she told her baffled coworkers in the park. But how did she know?
“I want to meet somebody,” she said to Mqaret experimentally.
Mqaret laughed at her. “You like this guy! This person Wahram from Saturn. So maybe what you mean is ‘I’ve met somebody.’ ”
Swan stared at Mqaret. It still hadn’t fully sunk in to her that it was possible to be loved. Or even to love. “But I met him a long time ago. I’ve known him for years now!”
“Even better,” Mqaret said. “You know him. In fact you had to spend a lot of time with him. What happened in that utilidor? Didn’t something happen?”
“We whistled, mostly,” she said. “But yes. Something happened.”
“Maybe that’s what a marriage is,” Mqaret said. “Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.”
“Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.
At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she?
But wasn’t marriage a promise somehow not to change?
She slogged around in the wetlands and kept on thinking about it. One day a frog the same color as the rocks hopped away from her accidental hand, then sat there staring up at her, alert and curious, calm but ready to leap again. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.” And yet now that she had, it sat there glossier than any rock, alive and breathing.
She went out on a walkabout. Headed to the north of Terminator’s latitude, into the Tricrena Albedo. Out into the garbled chiaroscuro of the terminator, where sidelong rays of sunlight raked suddenly up the tilting land, blazing so violently that the still-shadowed land appeared blacker than matter. Clashing shards of black and white—her eye could scarcely put the landscape back together again. Just the way she liked it, sometimes. Her schizophrenic life space.
She fell into sunwalker mode, oriented herself by the memorized maps inside her. She knew as she trudged blindly westward that she would soon come over the rise north of Mahler, pass some baked ballardian abandoned space plane runways, then find herself at the top of an escarpment, a little bulging crack in the land, very old, the land above overlooking a two-hundred-meter drop to the plains below. Luckily the escarpment sported a system of tilted ledges that served as a neat staircase down. She had been here before. These Ebersbacher Ledges were often trod by sunwalkers using this route, and had been swept clear of dust and rubble many years before. So it was a broken switchbacking path of clean stone tilts that led her down to the plain beyond. On Mercury the horizon was just the right distance away, she felt; not something you could reach out and touch, but something you could walk to and investigate.
Out there now was a little group of sunwalkers, trudging patiently west. Little silver figures reminiscent of Inspector Genette, disappearing over the horizon. They would walk for a spell and then lie down in carts or travois to sleep while being pulled along by the others. Walking together, pulling sleeping people along—how beautiful the sense of trust and care, the playful handing over of your life to strangers—part of being Mercurial. For a long time it had been all she had needed in the way of company. That and her city.
She got to the bottom of the ledges and came onto the flat rubble plain of Tricrena Albedo. Here the trail disappeared, because any way was equally good. Here she could run into the night, gain ground on the dawn, stand on Yes Tor and watch the highest points of ground light like candles, then burn downward from their brilliant tips. To walk in the dawn perpetuall
y, ah, so devoutly to be wished! Who could stand high noon or the wane of day? Leave the dawn behind, run back into the night. Forestall the day—who knew what it would bring? She had no plan, no idea.
For a long time she ran and didn’t think much beyond the rock under her, the lay of the land. Nothing more needed. They could tear the guts out of Mercury, take out every valuable mineral in it, and the surface would not look one whit different. It was already a clinker of a world. The battered face of an old friend. Rock scattered everywhere, rubble, kipple, ejecta. The blanket of dust. Gold in them thar hills. But friends talk. I want to be able to talk to someone and have it mean something to me. I want to hear things that interest me, that surprise me, no matter how impossible I am to surprise. Except in truth I am so easily surprised. How could it be that someone was not there to surprise someone so easily surprised.
The saturnine person. What if there was a person you could depend on, someone who was steady, reliable, predictable, resolute; decisive after due thought; generous; kind. Phlegmatic, and yet prone to little gusts of enthusiasm, usually aesthetic pleasures of one sort or other. Happy in danger, a little drunk in danger. Someone capable of loving a landscape. Someone who liked to watch animals and chase them for a look. Someone who looked at her as if figuring her out was an interesting project and not just a problem to be solved, or part of the backdrop in some other more important drama. And looked at everyone else met with that same regard. Often with a little smile that seemed to express pleasure in the company shared. A reserved but friendly manner. If all our acquaintances were characterized in language only, we would look like collectors of contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons. For every kind of this there was a balance of that. People cut both ways. In someone like him a little cheery laugh began to seem like boisterousness.