Lena knew, of course, about Ben’s relationship with Madeleine. At length they talked about that, tentatively.
Lena had known about it long before Ben had left for the stars. She knew such things were inevitable, even necessary, in a separation that crossed generations. She herself had taken lovers, even an informal second husband with whom she’d raised children. The ties of galay and dhuwa were, she said, too strong to be broken by mere time and space.
Madeleine found she liked Lena. She still wasn’t sure if she envied Lena the ties she shared with Ben. To be bound by such powerful bonds, for a lifetime of indefinite duration, seemed claustrophobic to her. Perhaps I’ve been isolated too long, she thought.
After some hours they reached a polar cap. It turned out to be a region of cantaloupe terrain where every depression was filled with nitrogen snow. They camped here, near the pole, on the fringe of interstellar space. Overhead, Madeleine saw cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice crystals.
The pole was a dangerous place to walk. She saw evidence of geysers — huge pits blasted clean of snow — and dark streaks across the land, tens of kilometers long, like the remnants of gigantic roads. All of this under Neptune’s smoky light, and a rich dazzle of stars.
This was an enchanting world. Madeleine found herself, reluctantly, falling in love with Triton.
Reluctantly, because, she was coming to realize, she would have to destroy this place.
Lena brought her, on foot, to a small unmanned science station, painted bright yellow so it stood out from the pinkish snow.
“We are running a seismic survey,” she said. “There are stations like this all over Triton. Every time we shake the surface, by so much as a footstep, waves travel through this world’s frozen interior, and we can deduce what lies there.”
“And?”
“You understand that Triton is a ball of rock, overlaid by an ocean — a frozen ocean. But ice is not simple.” Lena picked up a loose fragment of ice and cupped it in her gloved hands. “This form is called ice one. It is the familiar form of ice, just as on Earth’s surface.” She squeezed tighter. “But if I were to crush it, eventually the crystal structure would collapse to an alternative, more closely packed, arrangement of molecules.”
“Ice two.”
“Yes. But that is not the end. There is a whole series of stable forms, reached with increasing pressure, the crystal structure more and more distorted from the pure tetrahedral form of ice one. And so, inside Triton, there are a series of layers: ice one at the surface, where we walk, all the way to a shell of ice eight, which overlays the rocky core…”
Madeleine nodded, not very interested.
The snows seemed to be layered. The deeper she dug with her booted toe, the richer the purple-brown colors of the sediment strata she uncovered. This hemisphere was entering its forty-year spring, and the polar cap was evaporating; thin winds of nitrogen would eventually carry all this cap material to the other pole, where it would snow out. And later, when it was autumn here, the flow was reversed. Triton’s atmosphere was not permanent: It was only the polar caps in transit, from one axis to another.
But Lena was still talking. “…large scale rebuilding of the planet is the same as—”
Madeleine held up her hands. “You left me behind. What are you telling me, Lena?”
“That there is evidence of tampering, planetary tampering, from the deepest past, here on Triton.”
Madeleine felt chilled. “Even here?”
“Just like Venus. Just like Earth. Nothing is primordial. Everything has been shaped.”
That inner layer of ice eight was no crude seam of compressed mush. It was very pure. And it seemed to have been sculpted.
When they got back to the tractor Lena showed Madeleine diagrams, seismic maps. The core had facets — triangles, hexagons — each kilometers wide. “It’s as if somebody encased the core in a huge jewel,” she said. “And it must have been done before the general freezing.”
“Somebody came here,” Madeleine said slowly, “and — somehow, manipulating temperature and pressure in that deep ocean — froze out this cage around the seabed.”
“Yes.”
“And the life-forms there—”
“Immediately destroyed, of course, their nutrient supply blocked, their very cells broken open by the freezing. We can see them, their relics, in the deep samples we have taken.”
Madeleine felt a deep, unreasoning anger well up in her. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”
Lena shrugged. “Perhaps it was not malice. They may have had a mission — insane, but a mission. Perhaps they thought they were helping these primitive Triton bugs. Perhaps they wished to spare the bugs the pain of growth, change, evolution, death. This great crystal structure encodes very little information. You need only a few bits to characterize its composition — pure ice eight — and its regular, repeating structure. It is static, perfect — even incorruptible. Life, on the other hand, requires a deep complexity. It is this complexity that gives us our potential, and our pain. Perhaps, you see, they felt pity…”
Madeleine frowned. “Lena, did Ben encourage you to show me this? Are you trying to persuade me to back off the Nereid project?”
“Ben and I have different experiences,” Lena said. “He traveled to the stars, and saw many things. I worked here, helping to uncover this strange, ancient tragedy.”
Yes. There was no need to go to the stars, Madeleine saw now. It was here, all the time, on Venus and Triton and God-knows-where, and even Earth. The central paradoxical mystery of the universe. Everywhere, life emergent. Everywhere, life crushed. And no explanation why it had to be this way. Over and over.
She felt her anger burn brighter. She had made her own decision. This wasn’t simply what Nemoto wanted. It had become what she wanted. And that burning desire felt good.
Lena smiled, gnomic, wise.
By the time they got back to Kasyapa, the flower-ships had grown in Triton’s sky, until at last their delicate filigree structure was visible, just, with the naked eye. The same fucking Gaijin who had watched as Earth had gone to hell.
She sailed up to orbit, boarded Gurrutu, and headed for Nereid.
Madeleine first sighted Nereid ten days out. It grew rapidly, day by day, finally hour by hour, until its battered gray hide filled the viewing windows.
Rendezvous with the hurtling rock was difficult. The Gurrutu couldn’t muster the velocity change required to match Nereid’s crashing orbit. So Madeleine had to burn her engines and use tethers, harpooning this great rock whale as it hurtled past, letting her ship be dragged along with it. Gurrutu suffered considerable damage, but nothing significant enough to make Madeleine abort.
She entered a loose, slow orbit, inspecting the moon’s surface. Nereid was uninteresting: just a misshapen ball of dirty ice, pocked by craters; it was so small it had never melted, never differentiated into layers of rock and ice like Triton, never had any genuine geology. Nereid was a relic of the past, a ruin of the more orderly moon system that had been wrecked when Triton was captured.
But, despite its small size, it massed as much as 5 percent of Triton’s own bulk. And where Triton’s orbit, though retrograde, was neatly circular, Nereid followed a wide, swooping ellipse, taking almost an Earth year to complete a single one of its “months” around Neptune.