And then there was Titan.
Though on Earth she was more than a light-hour away from the Saturn system, Mara eagerly followed Virtual-feed reports as a flitter piloted by Tasqer dropped from the spine of the Endurance and dipped into Titan’s perpetual photochemical smog. Soon the brownish murk began to clear, and she made out a surface, far below, oddly Earthlike, with mountains of ice hard as basalt and oceans, lakes and rivers of liquid methane and ethane, richly polluted by hydrocarbons. Michael Poole himself had opened up Titan for resource exploration, and since not long after Poole’s time this had been the most populous world outside the orbit of Jupiter. Titan had cradled mankind’s most remote cities, and huge factory ships had sailed these complex oceans, trailing high, oily wakes; enough food had been manufactured in those giant ships to feed all of Earth. Well, the oceans were still there, and Mara let the ancient, familiar names roll through her head: there was the Kuiper Sea, the Galilei Archipelago, the Ocean of Huygens, James Maxwell Bay . . . Now Earth had to feed itself, for the Qax had shut down interplanetary human trade, and few ships sailed Titan’s seas.
But there were exotic-matter toruses here, just as on the Moon and Mars, huge blue structures beside the domes of the old cities – even of the capital, Port Cassini.
People on Titan had welcomed the exotic-matter project. It brought a purpose to life beyond mere subsistence on a more or less implacably hostile world. And as the flitter landed at sites like Port Cassini, Mara watched as her son led the party from Earth through civic receptions and rallies for the workers. Tall, bold, handsome, an aristocrat of a powerful old Navy family on Earth, Juq effortlessly dominated such events – although he always had his uncle Chael, the manipulative power behind the throne, at his side.
The Endurance project felt human and aspirational, just as Chael had promised. It seemed to Mara, a mere month after Parz had approved this huge expansion of the project, that nobody swept up in all the excitement cared that this was a project inspired and owned by the Qax, alien overlords of the Solar System.
Or that even now nobody really knew what this project was ultimately for. When she thought this over Mara felt flickers of a deep unease.
And meanwhile her son, in these heady days, was becoming famous.
It came as a shock when Jasoft Parz intervened again. Exotic matter production rates were still not sufficient.
This was despite the fact that the designers had by now found a way to use much less exotic matter than Poole had required to thread his wormholes. The relativistic equations that described wormholes were nonlinear and allowed for feedback effects; it was possible to use a small amount of exotic matter smartly, to produce a kind of shock wave that would propagate down a wormhole throat, enabling a much larger passageway to be held open for the same amount of material . . . Even despite such ingenuity, the production capacity was not enough.
It had been a first instinct to lodge the engineering of this high-energy spaceflight project away from the Earth, for safety reasons. Though good progress had been made, it was soon clear that the populations away from the home world would not be sufficient to achieve the Qax Governor’s target. ‘I remind you again that Michael Poole took forty years over the Cauchy,’ Parz said. ‘We have four more months . . .’
Parz commanded, on behalf of the Governor, that fabrication facilities be set up on the surface of the Earth itself. And when, just a few days later, an exotic-matter facility began to be constructed east of Mellborn’s city boundary, Mara’s unease deepened further.
4
Engineer Tasqer visited Mellborn alone.
He told Mara that he was here to begin consultation on the next stage of the project, which would entail collecting exotic-matter stocks from plants like Mellborn’s across the planet and shipping them to Jupiter’s orbit, where, like Michael Poole’s Cauchy long ago, the great new wormhole would be assembled. This alone was going to be a huge logistical exercise.
Mara hosted the man for the night. Then in the morning she escorted him out to the exotic-matter plant at Yarraranj, some fifty kilometres to the east of the city.
And at the end of the day, when his meetings were done, she walked with him along a waymarked trail, away from the gleaming new blue torus, and into the country beyond. The exotic-matter plant had been set far enough out of the city to be beyond the suburbs, in a landscape giving way to nature – or at least nature as reconstructed by ecologists and geneticists who predated Michael Poole, back in an age when humans had done their best to fix retrospectively the damage their ancestors had done to the Earth. This was an arid landscape – not as arid as Australe had once been, after millennia of humans burning back the bush, but still only sparsely covered by scrub and gum trees. And here and there tremendous beasts moved, their shadows clear in the intense sunlight. Mara recognised the profiles of huge, muscular kangaroos.
Against this setting, the powder blue of the Qax facility looked ugly and out of place.
To Mara’s amusement, Tasqer, a pilot of interplanetary craft born into a rebel stronghold between worlds, seemed remarkably uneasy to be walking out in the open, on the planet that was after all the home of mankind. Perhaps this was the secret, spiteful reason she’d insisted on taking this walk with him.
‘You’re safe, you know.’
There was a deep growl, almost subterranean.
He glanced around. ‘What was that?’
She was embarrassed that she wasn’t sure; she lived her own life in the city. ‘A diprotodon, I think. A big marsupial beast the size of a rhino.’
‘Of a what?’
‘The other really big beasts out here are the megalanias, a kind of giant lizard that will take on an adult diprotodon. And dinornis, big flightless birds.’ She eyed him. ‘But don’t think birds. Think dinosaurs.’ This didn’t make him look any more comfortable, she observed gleefully.
He glanced around. ‘And I guess these beasts are all made harmless in some way. Defanged. Conditioned, made unable to attack humans.’
‘Oh, no. What would be the point of that? Human fatalities are remarkably rare . . . Look, I’m kidding with you.’ She gestured at the trail, the sparse posts that lined it. ‘You’re fully protected; there are force fields, sonic barriers. The critters soon learn to keep away. And don’t you think what our ancestors achieved here was remarkable? Although of course the Paradoxa Collegiate reconstruction dates from an age when AS technology was becoming widely available, life spans were lengthening, and people started to think seriously of projects on very long timescales.’
He grunted. ‘Because they were suddenly liable to stick around to see the consequences of their actions. You do know your history, don’t you?’
She had always resented his jabs. ‘I know I have a privileged position under this Occupation. Myself and my family, but I do try to use that privilege for good. Such as, yes, keeping human history and culture alive.’
‘Good for you,’ he said dismissively.
She sighed. ‘Very well. So how was your day?’
‘The meetings went well enough, given the magnitude of what we’re trying to do, and the timescale we have to work to. Just months! I took a tour of the facility. So many people labouring in the fusion plants, the Xeelee construction-material parks, the extraction bays – all those containment pods full of exotic matter piling up on lift pallets. Did you know the Qax Governor is demanding a wormhole Interface even bigger than the one Poole used? A huge icosahedral design, big enough to swallow a Spline ship . . . Well. Things are going as well as they could be, but the exotic matter dribbles out of facilities like this, and we need countless tonnes up there at Jupiter.’