‘Here we go again,’ Hektor growled. ‘Pelle, I told you this was a waste of time. We’ve had conversations like this since he was five years old, and every time it finishes up the same. Us being reasonable, him getting angry and stubborn.’
Symat and Pelle spoke at once. ‘And you think that’s my fault?’ ‘Hektor, please—’
Unexpectedly Mela stepped forward. She said gravely, ‘No wonder you argue. You’re starting out from different premises. Different positions. You’re different kinds of people.’
Hektor’s eyes narrowed.
‘What do you mean, different?’ Pelle said. ‘He’s my son. How different can he be?’
‘The Scourge has been continuing now for three hundred thousand years. To the Xeelee the Scourge is a conscious project. To humans it has become our environment.’ Mela’s voice was neutral, her words not quite her own, Symat thought. ‘A steady force applied to a population for long enough becomes a selection pressure. In such an environment those able psychologically to accept the reality of inevitable defeat will prosper. And that is why you are prepared to walk trustingly into the booths, even without knowing what lies beyond. Your ancestors have learned to accept similar bolt-holes without question, far back into your history. You’ve been preadapted to accept the booths for ten thousand generations! Perhaps even that was part of the grand design of the Scourge.’
Hektor said, ‘You’ve got a wide perspective for a twelve-year-old.’
Symat, troubled, thought he glimpsed the Conclave, the vast composite mind for which Mela was sometimes, it seemed, a mouthpiece. ‘She’s right, though, isn’t she? But why can’t I just walk into the booths with the rest?’
‘Because you’re different,’ Mela said, sounding almost amused. ‘Can’t you see that? You don’t even look the same.’
Symat glanced around at his family, his tall, elegant, long-boned Martian parents towering over his own squat, thick-boned form.
Mela said, almost mischievously, ‘The differences go all the way down to the genes. You could almost be called a throw-back, Symat. But you know what? You’re just as you’re meant to be.’
Pelle snapped, ‘What are you talking about?
Symat demanded, ‘Who meant me to be this way?’
Hektor turned on the girl. ‘You’re getting on my nerves. Why are you here?’
Mela seemed upset by the family’s brief unity in hostility to her, but she quickly recovered. Symat thought it was as if new data were continually being downloaded into her head. ‘Symat, you don’t want to follow your parents into the booths. The trouble is you can’t imagine an alternative. But there is another way out.’
‘There is?’
‘It depends on you. The Conclave wanted to reach you, Symat. That’s why I’m here. If you hadn’t found me, it would have been somebody else. Another Virtual. There is somebody who would like to meet you. Very much indeed.’
She no longer sounded like a twelve-year-old girl at all. Looking into her eyes, Symat began to feel frightened. In the corner of his eye he saw his mother, distressed, cling to Hektor’s arm.
‘Where will I have to go?’
‘Far from Mars…’ Mela smiled, suddenly herself again. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’
III
Pelle insisted they loan her son the family flitter for his jaunt: ‘At least it will keep him safe.’ With very bad grace, Hektor agreed.
So Symat and Mela climbed aboard the ship once more, just the two of them. The flitter rose until the world shrank to a scrap of floor. Symat felt as if he had climbed to the top of a pole a million kilometres tall, and vertigo crowded his mind.
A Virtual of his mother’s face appeared before him, concerned. ‘We have to hand the ship over to the Mist,’ she said.
Up to this point the ship had been under the override of his parents, down on Mars. But now the lofty agencies who had summoned Symat through Mela would take control of the flitter and guide him into the darkness, out of his parents’ protection.
‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ Virtual Pelle said in a rush. She glanced at Mela with a trace of malevolence. ‘You don’t have to do what she says. And you won’t – oh, you won’t lose face if you turn around and come back to us.’
‘Mother, I’m caught up in some kind of mystery. I need to understand. I’m making an adult choice. I think.’
She nodded, her lips tight. ‘Then I won’t stop you. But I’ll be tracking you every step of the way.’ The Virtual shut itself down, dispersing in a cloud of pixels.
The ship flipped over, and Mars squirted away.
Mela was watching him. ‘Are you OK?’
Symat felt a pang of regret. But he had made his choice, and now he had to follow it through. ‘I’m fine. What about you?’
‘I don’t matter.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘I’m all right.’
He tried to focus on the journey. Mars was gone, and the sun’s huge hull was receding. ‘We’re going away from the sun. Where to? Saturn?’ His knowledge of Sol system’s geography was vague, but he knew Saturn was a giant world out in the dark, far out beyond the orbit of Mars.
‘Not as far as that. Not at first.’ Her small face was creased with concentration. It was as if she was listening to a faint voice only she could hear.
‘So where? Jupiter?’
‘No. Jupiter’s on the far side of the sun right now.’
Symat was faintly disappointed. He’d have liked to see the black hole remnant and its shattered moons. ‘Then what? An asteroid? There is a belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.’
‘There was. But the belt was mined out long ago. And then when the sun started heating up many of the remaining icy bodies were destroyed. Sol system was a lot more interesting, once.’ She sounded wistful.
‘So where are we going?’
She smiled. ‘You’ll see.’
He studied her, curious. ‘What’s it like?’
‘What?’
‘When you get stuff downloaded into your head.’
She frowned, trying to find words. ‘It’s as if I lost my memory, then recovered it.’
‘It doesn’t sound very comfortable. Not if it feels like you’re sick.’
She sighed. ‘It’s not comfortable. And I don’t have any control over it. The stuff just pours into my head when it’s needed – when you need it. Sometimes even when I’m asleep, it comes.’
‘I didn’t know your kind slept,’ he said. She looked hurt, and he added hastily, ‘Sorry. And I’m sorry you’re having to put up with this, for my sake.’
‘It’s not your fault. And anyhow if I hadn’t been around when the Conclave decided it needed to speak to you, if they’d picked some other Virtual, I’d never have got to see all this.’ She waved a hand at the utter darkness beyond the enclosing walls of the flitter, and they both burst out laughing.
Symat clapped his hands to opaque the hull, and suddenly the flitter felt like a cosy room. ‘So shall we play a game?’
Mela smiled. ‘OK.’
No longer children but not yet adults, the two of them ran and laughed through the confines of the tiny ship, as it sailed on into the mined-out emptiness of Sol system.
After a day of silent transit, their destination came swimming out of the dark.
It was just a lump of ice at first glance, maybe a couple of hundred kilometres across. Tinted an odd red-purple colour, it was only vaguely spherical. It was impossible to tell if the scars on its surface were natural or man-made, for the ice had obviously been heavily melted, and the ridges and crater walls were softened and slumped. But this island of ice was occupied. Symat saw lights, defiant green and white, gleaming in crater shadows.