Enson leapt on that. ‘Two to power twelve.’

  Hackett’s mental arithmetic was just about up to that. ‘About four thousand?’

  ‘And a healthy margin under the maximum capacity of five thousand or so,’ Pogee said.

  Enson grinned. ‘You are interested in our engineering. Please. Let me show you how we live. It would be my honour.’

  And little Agna tugged at his hand. ‘Come and see, come and see.’

  Icsoba smiled and nodded. ‘Please.’

  Hackett glanced a little helplessly at Pogee.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll stay with you. Look. As you’ll have gathered, visitors are few and far between. There are other settlements surviving on Earth, in the Solar System. All as reclusive as this lot …’

  ‘How many on Earth?’

  ‘About a hundred million people. Respectable enough …’

  ‘Come on,’ said little Agna.

  And so on he came, with Agna, Enson, Pogee, and a small comet-tail of curious observers – not all of them children.

  The dome above was so shallow it looked like a flat roof overhead, and the main floor was about ten metres beneath the outside surface level, as Pogee had said. Around the periphery he saw stairs, open elevator platforms, what looked like escalators, to get down from the ice level to that floor.

  And as he descended one of those escalators, down to that lower floor – looking past the crowding people now – he found himself looking over a park-like vista, with green spaces interspersed by low, flat buildings, a network of paths or roads connecting them. The road layout seemed an interesting tangle, nearby anyhow. Like something that had evolved rather than been planned. Maybe after enough time there was no real difference.

  When he looked further out, he realised he couldn’t see into the far distance. Past a certain point the detail merged into a crowded horizon, under that roof – awe-inspiring, once you were under it.

  They walked off the escalator, and on to a green area.

  ‘This is what we eat,’ said little Agna. She ran ahead.

  Hackett saw what looked to him like an experimental agricultural plot, low green plants carpeting what looked like, smelled like, rich earth, under banks of artificial light. He wondered if descendants of earthworms were tunnelling through it as he watched, genetically engineered or otherwise.

  Little Agna knelt down on the ground, reached over, plucked a few leaves, and popped them in her mouth. She looked up at Hackett, and held up a handful. ‘Want some?’

  He hesitated. Every astronaut instinct warned him not to eat unknown foodstuffs.

  Pogee took the morsels, thanked the girl, and ate the greenery. She said to Hackett, ‘I understand your caution,’ she said. ‘But this is probably the safest food you will ever have encountered. And the most nutritious.’

  ‘We call it smartcrop,’ Enson said, with every evidence of pride. ‘It’s ancient tech – everything here is ancient – but we are trying to improve it. It even has an enhanced intelligence, you see, making it capable of growing everywhere – and of responding to any problems it encounters with the host, the consumer. Treating certain illnesses, for instance. Or it can produce anti-viral vaccines. Everything save for a broken bone, we like to say, but even then the crop will help bone knit, speed the recovery …’

  Enson particularly seemed proud of this, and wanted to show it off. He and Pogee launched into an intense, detailed conversation about the capabilities of this ‘smartcrop’.

  Pogee said it had all been new to her when she arrived. ‘Smartcrop is a good name …’

  The basic technology, Hackett gathered, was about information transfer. Even in nature, plants could ‘talk’ to some extent, using gene transfer direct from one generation of plants to the next, or, between more significant plants – like trees – by means of certain fungi that intertwined with the individual plants’ roots. There could develop a sort of neural net, spanning roots, fields of crops, even forests … The result was evidently a suite of plants like a spreading AI, plants that could, given time, self-direct their own evolution into more useful forms – indeed, more efficient. And that strange intelligence was what humans had used to develop smartcrop.

  There was a certain compelling logic to the result, Hackett saw, as Pogee took him through this. He knew enough, if only from studying food cycles on the Perseus and other craft, that food chains as they had evolved on old Earth had been hugely inefficient. It had all been all driven by sunlight energy – but only one hundred-thousandth part of that was delivered to the end user, after plants had used energy to grow, and the plants were consumed by herbivores, and the herbivores were consumed in turn by predators like humans. The goal with smartcrops was to deliver a much higher percentage of the incoming energy to the end user.

  Hackett glanced around at the dome, the plants, the barefoot children. It was a forced evolution, intended to maximise efficiency of energy usage rather than complexity. Another product of megayears of space colonisation, no doubt. Flowers bred for the Kuiper Belt.

  But so what? What had they done with all this advancement?

  Pogee was watching him – suspiciously, perhaps. She said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That it’s a remarkable … vision,’ Hackett said cautiously. He didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.

  Enson looked at him suspiciously. Pogee seemed wary.

  Little Agna, aware of the adults’ tension, drew back to her father and held his hand, peeking around his legs at Hackett, sucking her thumb.

  And Hackett, looking down on the father, isolated by his own ridiculous height, felt a deep, intense regret.

  Pogee drew him aside. ‘Suddenly you are radiating negativity. You only just got here, remember?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I get that I have a part to play; I’m just not playing it well. It’s just—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is this all they have, after five million years?’

  She just glared at him. ‘Well, you’re upsetting little Agna.’

  Agna reacted to her name being mentioned. She walked forward and reached up to take Hackett’s hand.

  Her own hand felt like the most delicate object he had ever handled.

  She said, ‘Would you like to play in the Maze?’

  Icsoba grinned, the tension breaking. ‘I think that’s the best idea anybody’s had today.’ She took Hackett’s right arm. ‘Let’s go see the Maze …’

  The Maze turned out to be just that.

  It was situated in a patch of forest, directly under the apex of the dome, along with a number of other ornamental or recreational buildings – what looked to Hackett like a bandstand, a kind of swimming pool, maybe sports arenas.

  The Maze nestled in a pit made by clearing away the earth down to the bedrock beneath. The Maze itself evidently been created by cutting away its path into the bedrock beneath, leaving a tangle of walls standing, maybe two metres tall. The resulting dark passageways seemed a little claustrophobic to Hackett – and the Maze was big too, maybe fifty metres square.

  Agna and a number of other children, gathered up as the party had marched to the centre, happily dropped without hesitation down into the Maze, using ladders and ropes.

  Icsoba walked more carefully out to the centre of the Maze, following wooden bridges laid on top of the walls. She held up a soft toy – it looked like a baby aurochs to Hackett – and said, ‘First one to the calf is the winner! Ready? And – go!’ She dropped the toy down into the heart of the Maze.

  The children began to run the Maze, laughing and shouting, while their families yelled encouragement from above.

  Enson approached Hackett warily. ‘John Hackett – I’m sorry if any of this has made you unhappy. We welcome visitors. But perhaps we overwhelm—’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Hackett said, still struggling with his feelings.

  ‘But we do see continuity, preservation, as the key to our culture,’ Enson said now. ‘Myself, I learned that much about ourselves from Rava Pogee, with her outsider’s point of view. Why, look at this Maze as an example. When it first began, so the legend goes, not long after the first landing here, it was marked out on the bare rock with ropes as rules and lines of paint, and the children just ran around in the open air. Now look at it. Just imagine!’

  And Hackett did imagine it. Did see it now, suddenly.

  This Maze hadn’t been dug out, not a few decades ago, or any time recently. Not long after the first landing here.

  It had been marked out, and then worn into the bedrock.

  Worn by the feet of running children.

  Over years and decades and centuries and millennia …

  When he looked up, shocked by time, he met the wondering eyes of Icsoba – and Enson’s cautious scrutiny.

  23

  Inside the city on the ice, the days wore away smoothly. One after another. As they had for tens of thousands of generations, perhaps.

  Still, after an uncomfortable start, Hackett found it easy to adjust to the slow rhythms of life here.

  Part of it was the seductive calm of the colony itself. That huge dome above was semi-translucent, so that the daylight was reduced to a steady, sweeping wash, and day and night passed in a smooth, edgeless, seamless transition that reminded Hackett of the inside of a therapeutic isolation tank. And there was, apparently, very rarely any meaningful weather, up on this ice cap. Though there could be some vicious storms in the tropics – in the crowded temperate forests of north Africa and Amazonia, far away – there was barely any fresh precipitation at all up here on the ice, even at the height of summer or the depth of winter.

  Even so he wished he could rip a few windows in that dome, just to remind himself of where he was.

  After a few days, Rava Pogee said she understood how he felt.

  He said, ‘You told me to think of this as a landed space habitat, not a landlubber’s city, grown from the Earth. But I just spent subjective decades in a tin can of my own. So, huge as it is, why does this feel so claustrophobic?’

  She leaned closer. ‘Because of the inhabitants you share it with,’ she whispered. She grinned and walked away, leaving him to figure that out for himself.

  And as he spent more time with these people, he thought she had a point.

  He couldn’t complain about hospitality.

  Icsoba and Enson had taken him in, tentatively. Their wider family occupied a cluster of dome-shaped shelters, not far inside the southern entrance of Ambriel where Hackett himself had first entered. Domes: they were like igloos, he thought, flattish spherical caps with small doors, a few transparent panels for windows. They were built for the small folk of this age, and Hackett could barely stand straight even at the centre of the largest of these houses, with kids swarming around him, and laughing every time he scraped his head against the roof.

  And in such domes, and in the common areas around them, the people lived.

  Hackett thought that pretty much summed it up. They lived. They made meals, exclusively from smartcrop produce, highly technologically advanced artificial life forms plucked, beaten, roasted, fried, mashed, and turned into multi-flavour meals he couldn’t have labelled, but which were perfectly palatable – and interesting to make, as he learned when he volunteered for chores. He did miss chili, though.

  As well as cooking, they made stuff. Clothing. Shoes. It seemed there were automated factories of some kind that churned out anything you desired, in particular protective gear if you were to venture out onto the ice. But people made their own anyhow. They extracted what looked like cotton or flax from some of the smartcrops; they wove, plaited, dyed, even pursued crafts that looked like crochet or knitting. So the little kids like Agna ran around in brightly coloured garments, each unique, that wore out faster than they could be made, as far as Hackett could see.

  There was trade, of a sort. People cooked fancy meals for their neighbours in exchange for fancy clothes – that kind of thing. The raw materials were free, but it was the labour put into this stuff that made such goods valuable. Pogee had observed this for a longer time, and said there was an elaborate, ever-evolving exchange rate concerning such transactions, but she had seen no sign of anything like money, and only rarely any kind of written receipt or token. All word of mouth.

  People painted their little kids’ faces.

  They told their older kids stories – not of the heroic age of space from which Pogee and Hackett had come, but about how Grandfather had once had a face-painter decorate the back of his bald head, and he walked around backwards for two days, making everybody laugh until he nearly fell backwards into the Maze.

  For the older kids there was plenty of sport, highly competitive as far as Hackett could see – running, jumping, ball games, gymnastics. Ski races out on the ice.

  They just lived. One day after another.

  Only Icsoba, whose family had taken him in, seemed to have a sense of a wider perspective. Icsoba, who had come to meet him on the salt flat when he had fallen from the sky. Icsoba, evidently the current leader of the four thousand souls in this habitat, this grounded generation starship.

  The leader, though. What did that mean?

  If some crisis did blow up, either through some human misbehaviour or a technical or environmental glitch – an equipment failure, a meteorite strike – there must be lifeboat rules, a fall-back authoritarian command structure for quick decision making. So he imagined. That had always been the way in space habitats, colonies.

  But if there was any other kind of governance here, beyond Icsoba’s boosterish good nature, he had yet to see it in the presence of actual officials, or police, or whatnot. That hadn’t been so unusual in some of the smaller offworld habitats he had visited in his own time. Once you had more than a few hundred inhabitants – a number small enough to run things with town hall meetings, everybody getting together and having a say – you generally needed some kind of structure. That was hard-wired into human nature, it seemed to him.

  And yet there were four thousand souls living, right now, in this habitat, with no such structure apparent.

  Still, Hackett guessed that the group dynamic here was probably a deeper relic of his own spacefaring age, or an extension of it – a long age of small communities in isolated bubbles of technology, which – if they survived at all – had to develop a kind of group consciousness, an elevated awareness of the finiteness of their environment, and of how individual choices affected the security of that environment. Evidently the same kind of awareness had eventually emerged on Earth, belatedly, as the planet had slowly healed after the Sapiens Extinction. Just as Pogee had said. Generation starship rules.

  In this universe, in the very long run, humanity had evidently figured out that you survived by learning to stand still.

  Mostly.

  The trouble Hackett was finding was that these patient, kind folk stood too damn still for him.

  And he couldn’t shake off that image of the Maze, worn into rock by children’s bare feet. How long …?

  After a month of this – he counted the days – Hackett sought out Rava Pogee.

  It was late afternoon, the dome light fading to a kind of twilight. Pogee sat in her chair, at the perimeter of one of the larger sports parks. Just watching folk go by. When he approached, she patted a bench beside her chair. He felt too cooped up to sit still. But he sat anyway.

  In the distance young people ran and called and threw balls at each other, following the rules of yet another arcane game. Their shouting sounded oddly loud to Hackett. An evening sound, neighbourhood kids playing. Eternal.

  Pogee turned, stiffly, and said without preamble, ‘I knew you would get this way, after a few days, weeks.’

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Restless.’ She shrugged.

  ‘You knew, did you?’

  ‘Well, I got that way, and you have a lot more in common with me than our hosts, here. Which is why I asked Icsoba to take you, and me, out on her next excursion.’

  ‘Out? Out where?’

  ‘Does it matter? For your information, to what you would call an observatory, I think. They do actual science there, still. I say still. I once got hold of a history thread in their conversation. There seem to have been multiple … rebirths of science—’

  ‘Renaissances?’

  She seemed to look inward. ‘I think that’s an appropriate term. When one civilisation collapses, and its learning has to be rediscovered by its successors. After your time, the first recovery came after the First War of the Planets had blown itself out. Anyhow – oh, look, enough talk. Just come see what they do. That will give you a better insight into how they think than all my words. There’s an expedition tonight. Go get kit, and we’ll walk on the ice with our descendants.’

  He glanced around at the already dimming light. ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Daylight inhibits most forms of astronomy somewhat,’ she said dryly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll hold your hand.’

  24

  Hackett had been out of the dome a couple of times since his arrival. Because he was so tall compared to the population, there had had to be some heroic tailoring to produce a version of the locals’ layered outdoor clothing for him. He was slow to suit up, though, this evening as before, and was clumsy walking out, his longer legs notwithstanding.

  But as he and Rava passed through one of the dome’s big airlocks – on the west side, a way out new to Hackett – Icsoba and Enson were waiting for him. There were maybe a dozen others here, only a couple of them kids, the latter swaddled in coats, faces hidden from sight inside deep tunnel-like hoods.

  They all lined up and filed out of the dome.

  The locals’ conversation was quiet, but the words carried clearly over the ice, and were rendered comprehensible to Hackett by the invisible technology of the age. He estimated it was half gossip, half technical expedition chat. Nothing about himself.

  The night sky above was moonless and huge, speckled with brilliant stars. There wasn’t even an aurora. He might almost have been in deep space.