1

Zo sat at the back of a room full of diplomats, looking out the window at Terminator as the oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of Mercury. The hemiellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have been a pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too dangerous— one of many fascist regulations that bound life here— the state as nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere, hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems— everywhere except on noble Mars.

Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. She wanted to forget them and their little world, to go home and fly.

On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had up to this point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension of these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she took aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private meeting. The young man, an ex-Terran, was agreeable— Zo had made sure of his interest long before— and they retired to a terrace outside the city offices.

Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned that if Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge between us and play us off against each other. We’re the two largest collections of heavy metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization spreads, the more valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly spreading. This is the Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”

And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was truly spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its gravity nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron core, and its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through the meteor-battered surface.

“Yes . . . ?” the young man said.

“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit. . . . “

“Cartel?”

“Partnership.”

The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted against Mars by anyone.”

“Obviously. But we are.”

For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury had seemed to be very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being so close to the sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar energy. Just the resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding tracks they slid over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more in solar-collection potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing some of that sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first fleet of track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of Terminator in the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had thought they were rich.

Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment of various kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably plentiful. The so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the upper atmospheres of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the outer system. As a result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered insignificant. Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but dreadfully hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to boot.

Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man without much subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more conveniently located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return to dominance is very real.”

“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,” the young man said.

Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse danger for the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking that, if you don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to build another city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern hemisphere, and cruise in the terminator down there. Where some of the best metal deposits are.”

The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our permission.”

“Couldn’t we?”

“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”

“Why, what will you do?”

The young man was silent.

Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for everyone ever born.”

The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”

“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small ice fields lying inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in permanent shadow. These crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s purposes, but not much more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add more, however.”

“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No, that wouldn’t work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of the water from billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most of the water was lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would happen if comets struck up there now. You’d get a net loss.”

“The AI modelers suggest all kinds of possibilities. We could always try it and see.”

The young man stepped back, affronted. And rightly so; you couldn’t put a threat much more explicitly than that. But in slave moralities the good and the stupid tended to become much the same, so one had to be explicit. Zo held her expression steady, though the young man’s indignation had a commedia dell’arte quality that was quite funny. She stepped closer to him, emphasizing their difference in height; she had half a meter on him.

“I’ll give the Lion your message,” he said through his teeth.

“Thanks,” Zo said, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of physicist-priests, who were a black box for those on the outside, but like all good oligarchies predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would take the hint, and be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left their offices, and walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall. Her work was done, and so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.

She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a call to Jackie letting her know that the next move had been made. After that she walked out onto the balcony to have a smoke.

Her color vision surged under the impact of the chromotropics lacing her cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a Fauvist fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower strips, until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally) were a mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it. Tile roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held the greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Fabergé egg, elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were. But to be trapped inside one . . . well, there was nothing for it but to pass the hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got the word to go home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.

So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dôme, to party with Miguel and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians, writers and other artists and aesthetes who hung out at the café. It was a wild bunch. Mercury’s craters had all been named centuries before after the most famous artists in Terran history, and so as Terminator rolled along it passed Dürer and Mozart, Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on the planet were Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger Pushkin, in one of many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped Sophocles, Van Gogh was inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so on and so forth, in a most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and started tossing named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this party, a huge escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.

Zo thoroughly approved the method. But the effect on the artists currently living on Mercury had been catastrophic in the extreme. Constantly confronted as they were with Terra’s unmatchable canon, an overwhelming anxiety of influence had crippled them. But their partying had taken on a corresponding greatness that Zo quite enjoyed.

On this evening, after a considerable amount of drinking in the Dôme, during which time the city rolled between Stravinsky and Vyasa, the group took off through the narrow alleyways of the city, looking for trouble. A few blocks away they barged in on a ceremony of Mithraists or Zoroastrians, sun worshipers in any case, influential in local government and indeed perhaps the heart of it, and their catcalls quickly broke up the meeting and stimulated a fistfight, and in short order they had to run to avoid arrest by the local constabulary, the spasspolizei as the Dôme crowd called them.

After that they went to the Odeon, but were kicked out for being unruly; then they cruised the alleyways of the entertainment district, and danced outside a bar where loud bad industrial was being played. But there was something missing. Forced gaiety was so pathetic, Zo thought, looking down at their sweaty faces. “Let’s go outside,” she suggested. “Let’s go out on the surface and play piper at the gates of dawn.”

No one except Miguel showed any interest. They were worms in a bottle, they had forgotten the ground existed. But Miguel had promised to take her out many times, and now, with her time on Mercury short, he was finally just bored enough to agree to go.

• • •

Terminator’s tracks were numerous, each smooth gray cylinder held several meters off the ground by an endless row of thick pylons. As the city slid majestically westward, it passed small stationary platforms leading to underground transfer bunkers, baked ballardian space-plane runways, and crater-rim refuges. Leaving the city was a controlled activity, no surprise, but Miguel had a pass, and so the two of them activated the south city doors with it, and stepped into the lock and across into an underground station called Hammersmith. There they suited up, in bulky but flexible spacesuits, and went out through a lock into a tunnel, and up onto the blasted dust of Mercury.

Nothing could have been more clean and spare than this waste of black and gray. In such a context Miguel’s drunken giggling bothered Zo more than usual, and she turned down her helmet intercom until it was no more than a whisper.

Walking east of the city was dangerous; even standing still was dangerous; but to see the sun’s edge, that’s what they had to do. Zo kicked at the rocks as they wandered southwest, to get an angle on their view of the city. She wished she could fly over this back world; presumably some kind of rocket backpack would do the trick, but no one had bothered to work it up, as far as she knew. So they trudged along instead, keeping a sharp eye to the east. Very soon the sun would rise over that horizon; above them now, in the ultrathin neon-argon atmosphere, fine dust kicked up by electron bombardment turning to a faint white mist in the solar bombardment. Behind them the very top of the Dawn Wall was a blaze of pure white, impossible to look at even through the heavy differential filtering of their helmet face masks.

Then the rocky flat horizon ahead of them to the east, near Stravinsky Crater, turned into a silver nitrate image of itself. Zo stared into the explosive phosphorescent dancing line, rapt: Sol’s corona, like a forest fire in some silver forest just over the horizon. Zo’s spirit flashed likewise, she would have flown like Icarus into the sun if she could, she felt like a moth wanting the flame, a kind of spiritual sexual hunger, and indeed she was crying out in just the same involuntary orgasmic cries, such a fire, such a beauty. The solar rapture, they called this back in the city, and well named. Miguel felt it as well; he was leaping from boulder tops eastward, arms spread wide, like Icarus trying to launch himself.

Then he came down awkwardly in the dust, and Zo could hear his cry even with her intercom volume turned almost off. She ran to him and saw the impossible angle of his left knee, cried out herself and knelt at his side. Through the suit the ground was frigid. She helped him up, his arm over her shoulder. She turned up the volume on her intercom, even though he was groaning loudly. “Shut up,” she said. “Concentrate, pay attention.”

They got into a rhythm, hopping west after the receding Dawn Wall, still incandescent across the top of its tall bell curve. It was receding from them, there was no time to be lost. But they kept falling. The third time, sprawled in the dust, the landscape a blinding mix of pure white and pure black, Miguel screamed in pain and then panted out, “Go on, Zo, go save yourself! No reason both of us should die out here!”“Go!”

“Oh fuck that,” Zo said, picking herself up.

“I won’t! Shut up now, let me try carrying you.”

He weighed about what he would on Mars, seventy kilos with the suit, she guessed, more a matter of balance than anything else, so while he babbled on hysterically, “Let me go, Zo, truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all you know and all you need to know,” she leaned over and put her arms under his back and knees, which caused him to shriek. “Shut up!” she cried. “Right now this is the truth, and therefore beautiful.” And she laughed as she started to run with him in her arms.

He blocked her view of the ground directly before them, so she had to look forward in the blaze-and-black, with sweat in her eyes. It was hard going, and twice more she fell; but while running she thumped along at a good speed back toward the city.

Then she felt sunlight on her back. It was like the pricking of needles, even through her insulated suit. Massive surge of adrenaline; blinded by the light; some kind of valley aligned to the dawn; then back into the patchy zone of light-shot shadows, a crazy chiaroscuro; then, slowly, back into the terminator proper, everything shadowed and dim except for the fiery city wall, blazing far above. She was gasping hard for air, sweating heavily, hot from exertion now rather than sunlight. And yet still the sight of the incandescent arc at the top of the city was enough to make one into a Mithraist.

Of course even when the city was directly over them, there was no immediate way of getting back up into it. She had to run past it, on to the next underground station. Complete focus on running, for minute after minute. Lactic-acid pain. And there it was, up ahead on the horizon, a door in a hill beside the tracks; pound and pound over the smoothed regolith. Violent hammering on the door got the two of them let into the lock and inside, where they were arrested; but Zo just laughed at the spasspolizei, and got her helmet off, and Miguel’s, and kissed the sobbing Miguel repeatedly for his clumsiness. In his pain he didn’t notice, he was latched onto her as a drowning man to a lifesaver. She only succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp by banging him gently on his hurt knee. She laughed out loud at his howl, feeling a rush pour through her; such adrenaline, so beautiful, rarer by far than any sexual orgasm, thus more precious. So she kissed Miguel again and again, kisses that he did not notice, and then she barged through the spasspolizei, claiming diplomatic status and a need for haste. “Get him some drugs, you fools,” she said. “A shuttle for Mars is leaving tonight, I have to go.”

“Thank you, Zo!” Miguel cried. “Thank you! You saved my life!”

“I saved my trip home,” she said, and laughed at his expression. She returned to kiss him some more. “It’s me should be thanking you! Such an opportunity! Thank you, thank you.”

“No, thank you!”

“No, thank you!”

And even in his agony he laughed. “I love you, Zo.”

“And I love you.”

But if she didn’t hurry she would miss her shuttle.