SWAN IN THE VULCANOIDS

Terminator’s council had finally chosen the new Lion of Mercury, an old friend of Alex and Mqaret’s named Kris. Soon after being installed, Kris asked Swan to join a trip being organized to the Vulcanoids; Kris wanted to reaffirm the agreement Alex had made with the Vulcanoids to broker their light transmission to the outer planets. “It was another one of Alex’s verbal deals,” Kris said with a frown, “and since she died, and even more after the city burned, we’ve seen signs that the Vulcanoids are going upsystem behind our backs. It’s made some of us wonder—do you know if Interplan is investigating the Vulcanoids as possible suspects in the attack on Terminator?”

“I don’t think they are.”

Swan didn’t really want to go, or think about Genette’s ongoing investigation, as she was now absorbed in planting the redesigned park. But it would be a short trip, and the work would still be going on when she returned. So she packed her bag and stepped off with Kris and some aides onto the platform nearest Ustad Isa Crater, where there was a new railgun launch complex throwing ships downsystem.

Vulcanized spaceships were bulbous things, heavily protected and windowless. Their runs took them down to the string of thirty-kilometer asteroids orbiting in a zone 0.1 astronomical unit from the sun, meaning only fifteen million kilometers away from the star. Discovered from Mercury in the late twenty-first century, this almost perfectly circular necklace of burnt but stable beauties had recently been colonized, despite their being one thousand K on their sunward sides. These hemispheres, tidally locked so that they always faced the sun, had burnt away to the extent of several kilometers of rock loss over their lifetimes; they were primordial objects, as old as the oldest asteroids. Now they had been occupied like terraria anywhere else—hollowed out, with the excavated material used in this case to make immense circular light-catching solettas. These solettas processed and redirected sunlight in lased beams that could be aimed at receiver solettas in the outer solar system, now blazing like God’s own streetlights in the skies of Triton and Ganymede. The effect out there was dramatic enough that there were more outer satellite settlements asking for Vulcan streetlights than there were Vulcanoids to provide them.

As their sundiver approached the Vulcan orbit, the image shown onscreen represented the sun as a red circle and the Vulcanoids as a loose necklace of brilliant yellow dots across and outside the red. Green lines representing the lased light extended from the yellow dots outward to the sides of the image. The sun bulked large in all the representations. It seemed a fiery great dragon, and yet they kept flying toward it—boldly, rashly—they were too close for comfort. It was a transgression sure to be punished. On one screen it looked like a burning red heart, the grainy texture of flowing cell tops like muscle cut against the grain. They mustbe too close.

From its antisolar side, the particular Vulcanoid they approached was a bare dark rock, a typical potato asteroid, surrounded by a silver umbrella a hundred times its size. The dock was in the middle of the rock. At a certain point near the end of their approach, the asteroid and its soletta created a solar eclipse, and the unnerving sight of the red sun became in the end a mere halo of coronal fire, flailing its electric aura; then they were in the dark, in the shelter of the Vulcanoid’s shade. It was a palpable relief.

The people inside the rock were sun worshippers, as might be expected. Some looked like the sunwalkers of Mercury’s outback, carefree and foolish; others seemed like ascetics of a religious order. Most were men or hermaphrodites. They lived in the closest solar orbit that an object could maintain; the so-called sundivers were craft that only dipped a bit closer to the sun and then fled. This was as close as one could live.

It was inherently a religious space; Swan could accept that, but had a hard time imagining the votaries’ lives. The terrarium inside the rock was a desert, which was appropriate in the circumstances, but extremely uncomfortable: hot, dry, dusty. Even the Mojave was lush compared to it.

So this was a form of self-mortification, and while Swan had tried many such forms in her youth, and during the height of her abramovics, she no longer believed in self-mortification as an end in itself. She also felt that this new technology in the solettas had altered the devotional nature of these people’s lives, turning them into something more like lighthouse keepers. Their new system was ten million times stronger than Mercury’s older light-transferring technology, which would henceforth be rendered historical, like an oil lamp. Both Mercury’s contribution to the Mondragon Accord and its ability to do above and beyonds were greatly diminished by this development, and one part of the compensation the Mondragon committee had suggested was that Terminator should be the coordinating agent and broker for this new Vulcan ability to transfer light; but it was a matter for the principals to work out. As it had been, by Alex; but now that Alex was gone, and the brokerage house had been torched, would their clients and/or fellow citizens remain loyal to the deal? Would they help rebuild their agent, their bank, their old home?

“Well,” one of them said after Kris had described Terminator’s hope that the deal would hold. “Getting light to the outer system is our contribution to the Mondragon and to humanity. We’re in a better position to do this than you are on Mercury. We know you helped us get started, but now the Saturnians are offering to cover the costs of building solettas on all the Vulcanoids that can support them. And they really need our light out there. So we’ll take up as much of their offer as we can. It’s a bit more than we can handle right now, to tell the truth. We’re still fine-tuning the second generations. There are issues we’re still working on. We don’t have enough people to take advantage of everything they’re offering us.”

Kris was nodding. “You need our help to coordinate the whole effort. You’re down here peeling around at speed, getting cooked and getting your stations going.”

They thought that over. Their speaker said, “Maybe so. But when Terminator was out of commission, we had no problems. Now we’re thinking that Mercury should contribute to the Mondragon with things other than light, and leave us to it. You’ve got heavy metals, art history, and Terminator itself as a work of art, a tourist destination for the grand tour and for sun watchers. You’ll be fine.”

Kris shook her head. “We’re the capital of the inner system. With all due respect, you people operate power stations here. You need administration.”

“Maybe.”

Swan said, “Which Saturnians have you been talking to about this?”

They stared at her. “They speak to us as a league,” one of them replied. “But we have the same Saturnian liaison you do—their inner planets ambassador. You know him better than we do, from what we hear.”

“You mean Wahram?”

“Of course. He told us that you Mercurials knew the interplanetary situation, and would understand how important our light is to the Titan project. And to all the other outer planets as well.”

Swan did not reply.

Kris began discussing the Triton settlement and the plan there to stellarize Neptune.

“Yes,” one of the Vulcans replied, “but the Saturnians won’t do that to Saturn.”

Swan interrupted them: “Tell me more about Wahram; when did he visit you?”

“A couple years ago, I think.”

“Two years?”

“Wait,” another of them put in. “Our year is only six weeks long, so that was a joke there. It was just recently.”