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It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders? to Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff?
The planet had thirteen tiny, low-albedo moons spaced so consistently in the same orbit that everyone assumed they were alien artifacts.
Beyond them, there were the ruins. A long, low alien structure with two massive towers rising up above the landscape like a termite hill writ large. All of it was run through with passageways and chambers that no human had designed. In daylight, the ruins shone with the eerie colors of mother-of-pearl. In the night, they were only a deeper darkness.
Truth was Basia didn’t like the mines. The ruins were strange relics of the empty planet’s past, and like anything that was uncanny without posing a threat, they faded from his awareness after the first few months. The mines carried history and expectations. He’d spent half a lifetime in tunnels of ice, and tunnels that ran through alien soil smelled wrong.
Centuries before, Europeans had invaded the plague-emptied shell of the Americas, climbing aboard wooden ships with vast canvas sails and trusting the winds and the skill of sailors to take them from the lands they knew to what they called the New World. For as long as six months, religious fanatics and adventurers and the poverty-stricken desperate had consigned themselves to the uncharitable waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
“We’re doing things humanity’s never done before.” “Some things,” Trying said. “And some things we have always done. I hope history treats us gently.”
When the first colonies had begun on Mars, the perimeter domes had been a question of survival. Something to hold in air and keep out radiation. On New Terra, it was all about limiting contamination.
Someplace with maybe a breathable atmosphere. A magnetic field so we don’t all have to live like mole rats. It’s like having the terraforming project done already, except I’m alive to see it.”
“You like everyone,” Fayez teased. “It’s your pathology.” “You don’t like anyone.” “That’s mine,” he said, grinning.
Elvi realized that she’d been looking at something. A massive, articulated crab leg, maybe. Or a broken construction crane. The flat ground of the lake bed stretched out toward it, and then grew rougher until it reached the thing’s base.
It was an artifact. Ruins. Some arcane structure left from the alien civilization that had designed the protomolecule and the rings, abandoned and empty now.
Humans, Havelock knew from long experience, were first and foremost social animals, and he himself was profoundly human. It was more romantic—hell, more masculine—to pretend he was an island, unaffected by the waves of emotion around him. But it wasn’t true, and he’d made his peace with that fact.
“And if there’s another attack, sir?” Wei asked. “Then that’s a decision the squatters will have made, and we’ll respect their choice,” Murtry said. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” she said. Murtry’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “There’s a dignity in consequences.”
“If Fred is showing this to you, Holden, know that your home planet appreciates your service. Also try not to put your dick in this. It’s fucked enough already.”
“Ilus,” Fred said with a sigh, “is the name the Belters who landed there gave it. Royal Charter Energy, the corporation with the contract to do the initial exploration, call it New Terra.”
“Let me guess,” Holden said. “The Ilus Gate is on the opposite side from the Sol Gate.” “Not quite. They were smart enough to come in at an angle to avoid slamming into the Ring Station at three hundred thousand kph.”
“I think it’s safe to say the OPA has fundamental disagreements with the idea that the UN is unilaterally in charge of handing out those contracts.” “So you and Avasarala are back-channeling this to keep it from turning into something bigger.”
“The rules governing how a thousand planets are run are about to be made. This is the test case. You’ll be going in as an impartial observer and mediator.” “Me? As a mediator?” “The irony’s not lost on me. But things have already started to go bad there, and we need someone keeping it from getting worse while three governments decide how the next one will work.”
“You get them talking, and you keep them talking. And you do what you always do, you maintain absolute transparency. This is one time secrets won’t help anyone. Should be right up your alley.” “I thought I was the galaxy’s biggest loose cannon to you guys. Is Avasarala sending the match in to meet the powder keg because she wants this to fail?” Fred shrugged. “I care less what she wants you for than what I do. Maybe the old lady likes you. Don’t ask me to explain it.”
“You’re not wrong. You should take it,” Miller said. “The man’s right. It’s important. Something like that goes from a few pissed-off locals to a meat grinder without much time in between. This one time, back on Ceres—”
We’ll forget how to do this, Holden thought. Humanity had only just started learning how to live in space, and now they’d forget. Why develop new strategies for surviving on tiny stations like Medina when there were a thousand new worlds to conquer, with air and water free for the taking? It was an astounding thought, but it also left Holden just a little melancholy.
The ruins where they met were a half hour’s fast walk from the town itself. Great towers of strange, bonelike material rose up out of the ground, leaning against one another in patterns that seemed almost random until he caught them at just the correct angle and some ornate symmetry revealed itself. The lower structures were soft at the edges, curved like vertebrae or the gears of some unimaginably nimble machine.
The breeze was rising toward a wind, stirring dust devils. High above in the blue arc of sky, a wedge of vast creatures like aerial jellyfish trailed golden streamers from pale white bodies.
They’d made the bricks from the local earth, processed through some of the mining equipment and fired in a kiln powered by combustion. It could only have been more primitive if they’d dug a cave and painted bison on the walls.
Maybe living so long as refugees made us wild or brave. I don’t know, but to come here. To begin everything again under a sky. Under some new star. I thought it was as obvious as you did, and I don’t regret coming.”
“If we spend the rest of our lives mining lithium and trying to grow carrots, I will be delighted with that,” she went on. “If I never reattach another ligament or regrow a lost thumb, then fine. Because I chose it. Jacek and Felcia didn’t make that choice.”
“Being here is our choice,” Lucia said. “Felica’s choice is where her choice is. We can stand in the way or we can help.”
“We came from here. Nothing that happened before matters. We are from here now. Ilus. I will go down dying before I let them bring their wars and their weapons and their corporations and their science projects here. And I will be damned if they get any more of my children.”
“We aren’t from here,” Lucia said as if Jacek hadn’t come in, as if the adult conversation could go on with the boy there. “We’re making it that way, but it isn’t true yet.” “It will be,” Basia said.
By the time she got back to her little hut and took the corpses out for storage and cataloging, the mimic lizard and its prey would be modeled in her computer, terabytes of information ready to stream up to the Edward Israel and from there back to the labs on Luna. It would take the signal a few hours to travel the distance that had taken her eighteen months, but for those hours, she and her workgroup would be the only people in all the billions of humans scattered throughout the planets who would know this little being’s secrets.
If God had come and offered her the Library of Alexandria in exchange, she wouldn’t have taken the trade.
“I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.”
“Of course it means we’ve been here almost six weeks in the past month,” Fayez said, “but thank God we didn’t get one of those little spinning tops with sundown every six hours. Now if they can just fix the gravity.”
As she put the satchel into the archiving unit, it struck her how much her work was about inferring things from design. As soon as she’d seen the mimic lizard’s forward-facing eyes, she’d assumed it was a predator. Anyone looking at her hut would know it had been made with the assumption that space would be at a premium. Everything was an artifact of its function. That was what made evolution so gorgeous.
Elvi sat at the back with the other RCE employees, except Reeve and the security detail, who sat closer to the front with the locals. She watched them all segregate without a word. No one enforced the separation, but it was there.
“We have confirmation that the independent observer is on the way with a commission from the UN, the Martian congress, and the OPA to assist with moving the development of the colony forward. It is our hope to have the security issues addressed before they arrive.” We hope to hang the bad guys on a rope before anyone gets here and says we can’t, Fayez translated quietly enough for the words to reach Elvi’s ears and no farther.
Elvi sensed that the girl was building up to something. A confession or a threat. Something dangerous. Elvi hoped that she was just being paranoid, and was certain that she wasn’t. When the girl spoke at last, her voice was tight with anxiety and longing, and her words were the last thing Elvi would have guessed. “What’s it like going to a real university?”
The new sun was a faint dot of yellow-white light, not all that different from Sol when viewed from the Ring sitting just outside Uranus’ orbit. It had five rocky inner planets, one massive gas giant, and a number of dwarf planets in orbits even farther out than the Ring. The fourth inner planet, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, was Ilus. New Terra. Bering Survey Four. RCE charter 24771912-F23. Whatever you wanted to call it.
All those names were too simple for what it really was. Mankind’s first home around an alien star. Humans kept finding ways to turn the astonishing events of the last few years mundane. A few decades from now, when all the planets had been explored and colonized, the hub and its rings would just be a freeway system. No one would think twice about them.
“Yo,” Alex said. “How fast can you get us there?” “Pretty damn fast, if you’re willin’ to be uncomfortable.” “Put us on a fast burn schedule and get some dirt under my feet,” Holden said with a grin. “High burn’ll get us on the ground in ’bout seventy-three days.” “Seventy-three days,” Holden said. “Well, seventy-two point eight.” “Space,” Holden said, trading his grin for a sigh, “is too damn big.”
Love these little reminders of the scale of things.
The Belter colonists from Ganymede had spent months on the Barbapiccola prepping for landing on Ilus. Loading up on bone and muscle growth hormones, working out under a full g until their bodies would be able to handle the slightly heavier-than-Earth gravity of the planet. Naomi didn’t have the time or inclination to radically alter her physiology for this one job. Holden had argued that she would have then been able to come to Earth with him after. She replied that she was never going to Earth, no matter what. They’d left it at that, but it was still a sore spot for him.
“A thousand new worlds to explore, and we’re still fighting over resources,” Holden said to no one after a particularly long and angry message from the RCE legal counsel on the Israel.
“Maybe some of ’em have more lithium, but maybe they don’t. And this one definitely does. People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.”
“A vast new frontier has opened up for us. We have the chance to create a new society, with untold riches beyond every gate. But this world has treasure, so instead of figuring out the right way to divide up the damned galaxy, we’ll fight over the first crumbs we find.”
“First, how are you following me around? You first showed up on this ship after Ganymede, and you’ve been everywhere I go ever since. Am I infected? Is that how you stay with me? I’ve gone through two gates without ditching you, so either you’re inside my head or you’re a galaxy-wide phenomenon. Which is it?”
To be fair, he wasn’t exactly running a coherent program, that one. But he had enough of the old instructions left that he placed some material on the ship. Not much, and not what you’d call live culture. Just enough to keep a connection between the Ring Station’s processing power and your ship.”
“You’re safe. We need you.” “And when you don’t?” “Then no one’s safe,” Miller said, his eerie blue eyes flashing. “So stop obsessing.
“What will we find down on Ilus? What are you looking for?” “Same thing as always. Who done it,” Miller said. “After all, something killed off the civilization that built all this.” “And how will we know when we’ve found it?” “Oh,” Miller said, his grin vanishing. He leaned toward Holden, the smell of acetate and copper filling the air or else only his senses. “We’ll know.”
“Why it only happened once?” “Oh. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” “Same reason there’s only one tool-using hominid left. The ones that still exist killed all the competition,” Fayez said.
