Activity in her brain was damped down to almost nothing, interrupted only by the passing peaks of Solstice, who never went completely to sleep.
"Parameter." It was not a voice, even when Parameter was more fully conscious. It was words forming in her head, like thoughts, but they were not her own thoughts.
"(Recognition; slight reproach; receptivity)"
"Come on. Wake up."
"What is it?" Coming awake was effortless.
"Are you ready for vision now?"
"Sure. Why not?"
Solstice, functioning as a switchboard in the back of the cerebrum, closed the contacts that would allow Parameter's visual cortex to communicate with her forebrain: She saw.
"What a lovely morning."
"Yeah. Very nice. Wait till you see the morning papers. You won't be so happy."
"Can it wait? Why ruin it?" Parameter felt no sense of urgency. It had been a century since she felt rushed.
"Sure. Let me know when you're up to it."
Parameter communicated wry amusement to her symb. (Picture of herself buckling on sword, dagger, donning brass helmet and picking up embossed shield.) Solstice responded. (Picture of Parameter climbing a staircase, gazing at the stars, failing to see she was reaching for a top step that wasn't there.)
Parameter stretched, causing the filmy parasol to undulate slowly. She made tight fists of all four hands—she had no feet, having surgically replaced them with oversized hands at the time of her pairing—then spread twenty fingers. One hand caught her attention. It was pale, but was turning pinker as she watched. She had the coloring of an albino; the skin under her nails was amber, turning quickly to orange. Solstice was packing up, pumping liquids around, getting ready to move.
Nothing she saw was real. Her eyes were protected behind the opaque substance of Solstice; no light had fallen on her retinas in over seven years. Had she looked at the sun with her eyes, as she seemed to be doing, cells would have been destroyed. What she saw was the product of nerve impulses sent to different areas of her brain by Solstice's sensory receptors. But it looked to her as though she were floating naked in space, feeling the raw sunlight on her body. The illusion was complete.
"Okay. What's up?"
"This is up. I monitored this broadcast two minutes ago. It came from the Janus transmitter, channel nineteen. Where do you want it?"
"I don't care. Anywhere."
A three-dimensional image built up between Parameter and the dark semicircle of Saturn. It looked as real as anything else she could see. The view was the interior of a room. It could have been any room, but the woman sitting in it was someone Parameter knew. The voice-over explained that Lilo, the convicted Enemy of Humanity, had been put to death. It gave the time, the place, and a brief summary of her crimes. As the commentary moved on to a lecture about the evils of genetic experimentation, Solstice tuned it out without Parameter needing to ask for it.
"We knew it would happen," Parameter pointed out, wondering why the news did not affect her more.
"So did she."
"Okay. Where is she now?"
Her view shifted. Saturn appeared to rotate beneath her until she saw the Rings from the top. She seemed to be hovering over the north polar region.
At the bottom of the Ring, near where the shadow of Saturn cut across it, a small green arrow blinked on and off.
"That's us," Solstice said. Further around the curve of the Ring, about sixty degrees to spinward, a dark red arrow appeared. Its color told her the mass of the rock in question. It was on the edge of Ring Alpha, the outermost of the rings, where perturbations would not have been severe over five years.
Solstice caused the picture to zoom in. There was Lilo's life capsule as Parameter had last seen it, retrieved by Solstice from areas in their common brain that Parameter could never reach without hypnosis.
It was a rock—slightly larger than average, but in all a quite ordinary rock. Inside it was a nuclear generator, a computer, a modest rocket engine, a life-support system—and Lilo. Or someone who could become Lilo; a clone who, when Lilo's recorded memories were played into her, would become the Lilo of five years ago.
"Has it really been five years?"
"And sixty days and three hours, Old Earth Corrected Time."
"Doesn't seem like that." She studied the two arrows again. It was a long distance.
"One hundred forty-one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five kilometers, as the rock rolls," Solstice supplied.
"Well, we made a promise, didn't we?'"
"I was waiting for you to say it."
It was six years ago they had first met her. Lilo had set up her private research station on Janus, hoping that the status of that satellite as the interface between human and pair society would mean less vigilance, looser enforcement of the genetic statutes. Parameter/Solstice had met her there on one of their infrequent visits, and they had immediately liked her. That was rare for them. Humans and pairs do not generally mix.
They had hung around her small lab while they were on Janus, and when they were ready to leave they had suggested she move her entire operation into the Rings. Lilo had not been willing to go that far, but had approached them with the idea of setting up a robot station on the edge of the Rings. She was worried about getting caught. They had agreed to supervise the awakening of the clone if she ever needed it.
Now the long journey was ahead of them. It was impossible to hurry. Though they could reach speeds of fifty kilometers per hour in their travels, they had to stop to feed each day. It would take them nearly a year to reach Lilo.
"Well, every trip starts with one push," Solstice said. "Let's go."
4
I'm not a frequent visitor to any of the disneylands. To me, a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands and eat dirt-grown food is harmless, but silly. It makes us yearn for something we can never have, something that's always up there in the Lunar sky. It leads to lunatic fantasies like the one that had obsessed Tweed for so long: the retaking of Earth, the liberation of our home planet from the Invaders.
I grew up surrounded by metal, and have never felt deprived because of it. Stories of Old Earth glories leave me unmoved. Our frontiers will be found not by trying to recapture the past, but by looking within ourselves. I had tried to do that, and ended up in jail.
Tweed must have set the thermostat on his private paradise at around forty degrees. I was sweltering. Maybe the plants needed a summer, but I definitely didn't. And some unspeakable little vermin had found their way into my leg hair. Nature. I stripped off the bulky robe and tried to cool myself while Tweed pondered my fate.
Lilo saw Tweed make a signal to the man on the edge of the woods. She tensed. Was this it? He could decide she wasn't worth the trouble—she still didn't know what he had in mind for her—and things could start to happen fast. She watched Vaffa carefully. If they came at her, she vowed to do some damage on the way out.
But Tweed was hurrying through the thick grass. Vaffa relaxed a little when Tweed had gone out of sight. She sat in the grass and stroked the snake. This female Vaffa was two and a half meters tall, had no breasts and very little fat anywhere, and was completely hairless. She was bone-white all over. A death's-head: spare, economical of movement, powerful and lethal.