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  “Anne-Marie, are you okay?” he called.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  He heard sudden rain outside; Lake Ockham, in gravitational chaos, must have shot up an unexpected spray that reached all the way downtown, five kilometers away.

  He settled back to the floor with the slowness of a dust mote. He pulled on his dressing gown, his motions pitching him first one way then the other. He maneuvered himself to the door, floating most of the way. He didn’t sink back down this time. He frowned. Even a small rock like Ceres should have pulled him down. But it didn’t. It was as if the singularity in the middle of Ceres now repelled rather than attracted. He waved his hand in front of the sensor and the door slid open.

  He found Anne-Marie floating in front of the communications console. A bar of soap, a pencil, a clipboard, and several globules of orange juice floated freely in the air.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But we’ve lost contact with Joe.”

  Anne-Marie tried to raise Joe on the communications console, but no matter what she tried she got no response. Orbital decay, he thought. In such strong gravity the Gerard Kuiper would fall.

  She looked at him, worried. “Nothing,” she said. She typed yet more commands into the communications console. “This is the last we have from him.”

  Cody turned to the console, his skin tingling coldly at the prospect of imminent bad news.

  A holo-image of Joe Calaminci appeared in front of them. Joe looked tired, pale, as if he had spent too much time alone on the Gerard Kuiper. His hair needed washing, he needed a shave, and he had the wild look of cabin fever in his eyes.

  “Newton, this is the Kuiper,” said Joe. “Repeat, this is the Kuiper.” He stared at them, waiting, perplexed that he wasn’t getting an immediate response. “Have gone into unexpected orbital decay. Computer estimates escape velocity now at 55 kilometers per second.” Joe double-checked a panel of control displays. “Engineering status indicates insufficient thrust.” He turned back to them, his face settling, swallowed, and in a much lower voice said, “Impact in 35 seconds. Am downloading shipboard files to base computer.”

  They watched as Joe issued the necessary commands to the ship’s mainframe. Then he turned and looked directly at Cody and Anne-Marie. He didn’t say anything. He looked too scared to say anything. His face was white. The rims of his eyes were red. He looked like a man who had just been badly cheated. Then he glanced up at something on the control panel.

  And that was that.

  The holo-image filled with snow.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cody, Deirdre, Ben, and Jerry flew in the lander over the surface of Ceres toward the Angle Territories. Gravity had cycled back to .5 gees and had remained stable for the last four hours. According to last-known coordinates, the Gerard Kuiper had gone down in the southeast corner of the Territory of the Angle of Refraction, a hundred kilometers beyond any settled area.

  “Why doesn’t Vesta City get back to us?” asked Deirdre. “They’ve had six hours.”

  “I imagine they’re doing their best,” said Jerry. “This is the grav-core. They’re going to have to get their team of particle physicists to examine the data we’ve sent. And if there’s something wrong with it … it’s going to take them a while to come up with an answer.”

  “Yes, but I thought this was never supposed to happen,” she said. “I’m no physicist, but it’s never happened on Vesta. Six downtown buildings collapsed. Peter’s got a broken ankle and I’ve got a fractured rib, and everybody else has muscle sprains.”

  “At least no one is dead,” said Ben.

  “The grav-core on Vesta is a bit different,” said Cody. “It’s limited. It can’t go any higher than point-five. During the initial testing phase, as we moved from a rim-grav to a grav-core, after we had virtually turned the city upside down and were ready to go live, it reached point-six … and we had a collapse … in Residential Sector 5 … my old neighborhood.” Everyone was quiet. Cody couldn’t help thinking that as a highly placed member of the Public Works bureaucracy he should have been able to do something to stop that collapse. “Since then, they’ve fixed it,” he said. “They’ve made sure it can never go above point-five. They keep it at point-four to be on the safe side, well within the range of Vesta’s tidal flux tolerance. The grav-core here … well, it’s a lot older, the design features aren’t as refined, and the containment fields not as stable. And because Ceres is bigger, the grav-core here has to be stronger. Remember, it can go all the way up to one gee. It’s like a big, strong horse. It can get away from you if you don’t keep a tight rein on it.”

  “What do you think Council will decide?” asked Deirdre.

  Cody thought about it. “They’ll probably schedule the particle physicists and their crews sooner,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll get it working again. They’ve got ten percent of Vesta’s GDP invested in this project. They’d all be voted out of office at the next general election if they abandoned it.”

  Silence ensued. The shadows below grew longer and longer. Cody and his crew reached the asteroid’s terminator, where day ended and night began. The sun dipped out of sight behind them.

  “It’s just up here,” said Ben, gazing at the beacon coordinates on the screen.

  Cody gave the port ancillary thrusters a burst. The craft eased marginally to the left. He turned on the floodlights and the landscape below brightened.

  “I’m picking up tags,” said Ben, meaning the microscopic particles of ionized tungsten embedded in the Kuiper’s hull, a way to find even the smallest bits of wreckage from an orbital altitude.

  Cody lowered the landing craft, skimmed a hundred meters above the surface. The screen filled with tags, little green dots scattered all over the place. He stared at the green dots, didn’t want to believe in those green dots, knew all too well what they meant—the end of a man’s life, the passing of a friend, and the destruction of the spacecraft that was meant to take them home. For the time being, they were trapped on Ceres. In a separate window on the screen the computer extrapolated the wreckage trail. Cody slowed the craft and brought it even lower, fighting the urge to close his eyes, not wanting to see yet again, as he had seen with Residential Sector 5, just how easily things could be wrecked, not wishing to be reminded of just how fragile everything was.

  Soon they saw the wreckage, jagged chunks of metal strewn along the surface, as haphazard, bent, and fragmented as a spilled bag of potato chips, one chunk with the green Public Works logo of trees and clouds. The Kuiper‘s remote surveillance orbiter, previously carried in the spacecraft’s bay, now lay at the foot of a small hill, one side of its spherical hull flattened like a cantaloupe dropped on the floor. A piece of landing carriage, speared into the dirt by the force of the impact, stood straight up out of the surrounding wreckage like a monument.

  “Look at that,” said Ben. “The forward pod came off in one piece. He still might be in there.”

  Cody landed the craft. His hands felt stiff from gripping the controls so tightly. He and the crew clamped on their helmets, pressurized their suits, double-checked their communications, and prepared to disembark onto the surface. He couldn’t help feeling responsible for all this. He caught Deirdre looking at him, and was glad she was there. They got into the airlock and cycled the air. Then they stepped out onto the pitted surface.

  “A standard search grid,” he said. “You know the routine. Vesta City’s going to need a report. Jerry, let’s you and me check the forward pod.”

  As he approached the pod—a piece of the Kuiper that looked like the head of a praying mantis—he saw that its hull had a meter-wide gash in it. There couldn’t be any air in there, he decided. And he knew the pilot hadn’t had the time to suit up.

  They found Joe Calaminci jackknifed over the navigation console, his neck and back broken, his skull fractured, the urine and feces sucked right out of him, his tongue sticking out, bloated,
several lacerations along the left side of his head, frozen solid but, by the look of it, mercifully dead on impact, spared the excruciating death of the vacuum. Cody turned to Jerry. Jerry stared at the dead man. Cody felt frozen. Then he forced himself to move. He put his hand on Jerry’s arm.

  “Let’s go get the stretcher,” he said. “I’m going to call off the search.”

  Back in Newton, Cody and Jerry waited while the computer completed the final phase of the blue corpse’s genome mapping. Both were subdued. The death of Joe Calaminci hung like a pall over the whole crew. Cody had given crew the option of taking time off to deal with it, but everyone was out working; working was a way to get their minds off the entire incident. Jerry wasn’t convinced that the grav-core flux had in fact been an accident.

  “I’m not sure that they would be able to control something like the grav-core,” said Cody. “Think about it. We have this victim.” The body of the blue man lay on the autopsy table, sewn up roughly. “He’s walking through a sewer, he falls down one of the vertical drains, he breaks his leg—and he has no way he can call for help? Nothing in the way of a communications technology? No implants?”

  “Maybe he was an exception,” said the doctor, watching the strands of DNA sort themselves on the screen.

  “If they have no communications technology, I don’t think they’re going to have the know-how to control the grav-core. And this whole idea you have, that they would use the grav-core as a weapon against us—”

  “Let’s remember,” said Jerry, lifting his finger, “it looks like these blue people disabled the microsatellites, or at least tampered with them as far back as 25 years ago, and tampered with them in such a way that Vesta City didn’t even realize it. That’s know-how, Cody. They were probably the ones who built all those structures out on the surface, including that huge interstellar telescope or whatever it is out in County Hypotenuse. And it’s a good bet they’re the ones growing this lichen and glow-moss all over the place, in conditions where such organisms shouldn’t in theory stand a chance. That’s know-how. Keeping all that in mind, as well as the fact that they’ve already stolen our oxygen, why couldn’t they just as easily manipulate the grav-core against us?”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Cody, “they’re innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Cody,” said Jerry. “I’m sure Council’s reeling from this. I’m sure all the hard-liners are mobilizing. And as for us, our morale’s taken a bad blow.”

  Cody shook his head. “But why would the blue people manipulate the grav-core for the express purpose of making the Gerard Kuiper crash?” Cody stared at the screen as the last chains linked themselves together. “We’ve done nothing to antagonize them.”

  “Just being here on Ceres might be enough to antagonize them,” said Jerry, gesturing at the screen. “Here comes the final result.”

  As the mapping of the victim’s genome completed itself, Cody couldn’t help thinking that as compassionate as Jerry might feel toward the children of the Belt, he had nonetheless drawn an ideological line for himself as far as the blue people were concerned. He had an uncompromising streak that surprised Cody, considering Jerry was a highly educated man and a gifted general practitioner.

  Jerry issued comparison commands, and together they watched the graphics form themselves on the screen. The blue person’s DNA proved to be 99.43 percent similar to human DNA. Cody shook his head, amazed.

  “That close,” he said. “Yet look at the differences between us.”

  “Too many differences for my tastes,” said Jerry. “GK 3, run a comparison between the current genome and orphan DNA.” The answer came a second later. “Orphan DNA is 99.78 percent similar to the corpse’s DNA. The corpse is more closely matched to orphan DNA than he is to human DNA.” The doctor gave Cody a wry look. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Cody studied the bridge over the Oppenheimer Canal from Americium Avenue, wondering if it could be saved. Chunks of rubble lay strewn over the road and the pavement was cracked and pitted by shell craters, but the bridge itself looked as if it were in fairly good shape. Abandoned hover-cars lay forgotten in the middle of the bridge, casting long shadows in the portable floodlights, their once high-gloss finishes pale and dusty. He pressed a sequence of buttons on a hand-held remote and the floodlights rose higher on their poles. Deirdre stood beside him.

  “How’s that?” he asked when the floodlights stopped rising.

  “A little higher,” she said, “so we can get a good look into the canal.”

  He pressed the buttons again and the floodlights rose yet higher. He walked to the railing and looked down. The canal was dry, the pressure-resistant concrete walls discolored to the twenty-meter mark, where the water used to be. Someone had driven a truck into the canal. It lay on its side, battered and ruined. Skyscrapers rose on either bank. They were dim and indistinct in the glow coming from the floodlights, rising toward the cavernous stony sky, flecked with bits of glow-moss.

  “Cody?” said Deirdre.

  She was looking up at one of the skyscrapers across the canal, a terraced structure made of a pale jadelike material. He followed her gaze. And he saw them. Three of them. This made his fourth sighting so far. They were getting braver. The drastic increase in air pressure from the oxygen pops—from eight millibars to a thousand millibars—along with the corresponding rise in temperature didn’t seem to bother them at all. They stood five floors up on the first terrace. Blue skin, but skin that now looked gray in the harsh white glare coming from the floodlights. The three watched Cody and Deirdre as if they were curious. They never got closer than a couple of hundred meters.

  Cody walked over to his camera, which, mounted on a tripod, was used to digitally and spectrographically record structural damage and also detect any venting gases through compromised bulwarks and airlocks. He swung the camera around and engaged its telephoto lens. As the lens zoomed in, two of the blue people darted away. The third remained. A woman. Bare from the waist up. The same woman he had seen on two previous occasions.

  She, too, darted away after a moment.

  He shook his head.

  As long as they kept their distance, he would just have to accept them as neighbors.

  Cody sat on a bench next to the bathing pavilion along the shores of Lake Ockham. He had been coming here by himself ever since the water had melted. Coming here because this seemed to be one of her favorite places—the woman he had seen on the jade skyscraper across the Oppenheimer Canal. He knew she was here today, hiding behind one of the buttresses of the bathing pavilion, peeking out at him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking. He didn’t look at her, gave no hint that he knew she was there, didn’t want to scare her away.

  Ben, Wit, and Russ had lights strung along a hundred meters of shoreline now. The effect was pretty, nostalgic, like the lights along the boardwalk of some seaside town hundreds of years ago. He glanced surreptitiously to the right, saw her blue head, her white hair, caught a brief glance of her face, a pretty face; she looked about thirty. Since that time on the jade skyscraper a few days ago, he had seen her by the lake twice. She came when he was alone down here. And she always came by herself.

  He stood up, arched his back. She immediately ducked behind the buttress. He walked to the life-size chessboard—chess pieces fashioned after characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—and leaned against the Mad Hatter. Vesta City had nothing this fanciful in the way of Parks and Recreation; Vesta City sometimes took itself too seriously. The Mad Hatter poured tea. The March Hare and the Dormouse stood next to the Mad Hatter with teacups poised.

  Cody glanced back toward the bathing pavilion and saw the blue woman staring at him again.

  “Do you have a name?” he called.

  She instantly ducked back down. He shrugged. He wasn’t going to force her.

  She stood up slowly. She was naked from the waist up, breasts exposed, perfect little mounds with dark blue aureoles. She wore pan
ts, nothing else, trousers embroidered with beads, tinsel, and thread, made pretty in an idiosyncratic way. He wondered how she could stand the cold. The temperature down here by the lake was considerably cooler than it was back in Laws of Motion Square.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he called. “I want to know your name. I want to talk to you.”

  She didn’t respond. She just stood there, looking at him with wide violet eyes. He studied her. Blue skin the color of a robin’s egg, long arms, short legs, big eyes, long slender ears, white hair, and a noticeable protuberance on her left side—the enlarged stomach.

  He turned away, walked all the way to the White Rabbit, and stood there with his back to the blue woman. He stayed like that for a long time, wondering if she was acting as an emissary. He hoped she could tell him what had happened to their 27 oxygen tanks, property he wished to recover.

  When he turned, he was surprised to see her squatting on top of the Caterpillar, the tallest piece around, four meters high, twice his height. She picked pieces of lichen from the Caterpillar’s head and shoved them into her mouth, eating it. Then she stopped chewing and contemplated him, as if she were trying to figure out who or what he was.

  She jumped with squirrel-like agility from the Caterpillar to the Mock Turtle’s shoulder, hooking her arm around the figure’s neck for balance. She picked some lichen off the Mock Turtle’s face and offered it to Cody, her arm, despite its extra length, stretching with feminine grace. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t suspicious. He felt oddly peaceful as he looked at the woman. His wife’s tragic demise seemed far away, as did the passing of Joe Calaminci, and at least for these few merciful moments he didn’t feel the nagging ache of those deaths.

  He took a few steps toward her and took the lichen out of her hand. He wasn’t about to eat it, but he thought he should accept it. She stared at him for several seconds, as if she were waiting for him to eat the lichen, and when he didn’t a frown came to her face. She broke more lichen off the Mock Turtle’s face and shoved it into her mouth as if to demonstrate.