From orbit he had locked onto their moving caravan. It had only been a little distance ahead of the terminator, the dividing margin between day and night.

  “Hello,” he declared cheerfully. “I have come from Jupiter. I would like permission to land and speak with Rhawn.”

  “This is the Cyborg Artistic Collective,” came back the reply. “Thank you for your interest, but your request to speak with Rhawn is declined.”

  Oleg smiled, for this was nothing more or less than he had anticipated. “I’d still like to land. Is that possible?”

  “Do you have tradeable goods?”

  “Yes, and I’d also like to barter for fuel. I can set my ship down a little ahead of your caravan and cross the remaining ground on foot.”

  “That is acceptable,” the voice said eventually. “One of us will meet you. Bring your tradeables.”

  He lowered on thrust until his little ship pinned itself to the face of Mercury like a brooch. Once down, it flicked a parasol across itself and began to cool down.

  Oleg emerged from an airlock in a bulky spacesuit patterned with active mirror facets and fanlike cooling vanes. He went around to the back of the ship and unpacked two scuttling chrome spiders. The robots helped him unload the tradeable goods from the ship’s belly hatch. Then he orientated himself and set off for the caravan, with the spiders following.

  Here the Mercurean terrain was as flat as a salt lake. The caravan was a huge, raggedy thing composed of many travelling elements. Some as small as a person—some, indeed, were cyborgs jogging next to the procession—while others were as big as mansions or beached spacecraft. The larger structures were made up of a bits of scavenged vehicle, fuel tank and pressure module, cut-and-shut into rococo dwellings. Sails, banners and penants whipped high into the airless black. On one platform travelled the huge, lacy outline of a two hundred metre high stallion. Inside the horse’s geodesic chest cavity, tiny figures worked with nova-bright welding torches. Another form, equally tall, was a naked human woman balancing on one leg. She had her arms cantilevered out for balance, one ahead and one behind. Jammed into her torso at odd, disruptive angles were repurposed cargo modules.

  One of the cyborgs broke from the pack and jogged out to meet him. Beneath its knees, the cyborg’s legs were springy prosthetics that sent it metres into the sky with each stride.

  “Welcome, Oleg,” said a synthetic voice. “We spoke earlier. I am Gris. Have you been to Mercury before?”

  “No, this is my first time. Thank you for allowing me to land.”

  “That is a very impressive suit,” Gris said. “I imagine it could keep you alive for quite a while?”

  “Not as long as yours, I’d wager,” Oleg said.

  “Ah, but we don’t think of our suits as suits.” Gris touched a fist to its chest, in a kind of salute. “This is my skin, now and forever. I’m wired into it on a profound sensory level—full haptic and proprioceptive integration. I don’t just live in it—it’s part of me. I trust that doesn’t unsettle you?”

  “If it did, I’d be the wrong person to come to Mercury. And definitely the wrong person to speak to the Cyborg Artistic Collective.”

  Gris’s suit—or skin, if that was the proper way to think of it—was a mechanical integument giving little hint of the organic contents within. The armour was multicoloured and baroquely patterned. Gris’s helmet had become a beak-faced gargoyle, with multiple cameras wedged into its eye-sockets. There was no glass or visor.

  “I know you’ve come a long away,” Gris said. “But you mustn’t take Rhawn’s disinterest personally.”

  They walked under the Sun. In Oleg’s view it had no business being that big or that bright. The intensity of its illumination, averaged over an orbit, was a hundred times stronger than he was normally used to. That bloated inflamed Sun was an affront to his sensibilities. It would be very good to be on his way from Mercury, back to the civilised polities of Jovian Space.

  But not without the thing he had come for.

  “Rhawn’s star has risen,” he observed.

  “It makes no difference to her. Mercury is her home now. The sooner people accept that, the happier everyone will be. Are those your tradeables?”

  “It’s not much, I know. But there are some rare alloys and composites in there, which you may find of value.”

  When they were at the caravan cyborgs were waiting to pick through his offerings. A value would be placed on the items, which Oleg was free to accept or decline.

  “You can come aboard,” Gris said casually. “We have provision for guests, if you wish to get out of the suit. It will take a little while to give you a value for your goods, so you may as well.”

  “Thank you,” Oleg agreed.

  Gris brought him to one of the sliding, sledge-like platforms. They vaulted up onto a catwalk, then found an airlock leading into the side of a chequered structure made from an old fuel tank. Oleg satisfied himself by just removing the helmet and gloves, placing them next to him on a kind of combination sofa and padded mattress. Gris, squatting on the other side of a table, had removed no part of its suit except the spring extensions of its legs, presently racked by the door. Now it busied itself pouring herbal infusions into little alloy cups.

  “Were you an artist before you came here?” Oleg asked, to be making conversation.

  “Not at all. In fact I came to trade, just like you. My spaceship needed some repairs, so my stay turned from days into weeks. I had no intention of becoming part of the Collective.”

  “Were you … like this?”

  “Cyborgized, you mean? No, not at all. A few simple implants, but they don’t really count.” The goggled face was inscrutable, even as it decanted tea into a little receptacle on the end of its beaklike mandible. “It was a difficult decision to stay, but one that in hindsight was almost inevitable. There’s nowhere like this anywhere else in the system, Oleg—nowhere as simultaneously lawless and civilised. Around Jupiter, you’re bound up in rigid hierarchies of wealth and power. Here we have no money, no legal apparatus, no government.”

  “But to become what you are now … that can’t have been something you took lightly.”

  “There’s no going back,” Gris admitted. “The crossing—that’s what we call it—is far too thorough for that. I sold my skin to the flesh banks around Venus! But the benefits are incalculable. On Mars, they’re remaking the world to fit people. Here, we’re doing something much nobler: remaking ourselves to fit Mercury.”

  “And was Rhawn already here, when you were transformed?”

  “Ah,” Gris said, with a miff of disappointment. “Back to that now, are we?”

  “I’ve been sent to make contact. My masters will be very disappointed in me if I fail.”

  “Masters,” Gris dismissed. “Why would you ever work for someone, if you had a choice?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “Then I am afraid you had best prepare to disappoint your masters.”

  Oleg smiled and sipped at his tea. It was quite sweet, although not as warm as he would have liked. He presumed that Gris still had enough of a digestive tract to process fluids. “Rhawn’s early work, what she did before she came here, was just too original and unsettling to fit into anyone’s existing critical framework. They wanted her to be something she was not—more like the artists they already valued. In time, of course, they began to realise her worth. Her stock began to rise. But by then Rhawn had joined your Collective.”

  “None of this is disputed, Oleg. But Rhawn has had her crossing—become one of us. She has no interest in your world of investors and speculators, of critics and reputations.”

  “Nonetheless, my masters have a final offer. I would be remiss if I did not try everything in my power to bring it to Rhawn’s attention.”

  “Forget dangling money before her.”

  “It isn’t money.” Oleg, knowing he had the momentary advantage, continued to sip his tea. “They know that wouldn’t work. What they are offering, what they have secured, is something money almost couldn’t buy—not without all the right connections, anyway. A private moon, a place of her own—the space to work unobstructed, with limitless resources. More than that, she’ll have the attentions of the system’s best surgeons. Their retro-transformative capabilities are easily sufficient to undo her crossing, if that’s what she desires.”

  “I assure you it would not be.”

  “When she completed the crossing,” Oleg said patiently, “she would have surrendered to the total impossibility of ever undoing that work. But the landscape has changed! The economics of her reputation now allow what was forbidden. She must be informed of this.”

  “She’ll say no.”

  “Then let her! All I request—all my masters ask of me—is that Rhawn gives me her answer in person. Will you allow me that, Gris? Will you let me meet with Rhawn, just the once?”

  Gris took its time answering. Oleg speculated that some dialogue might be taking place beyond his immediate ken, Gris communing with its fellow artists, perhaps even Rhawn herself. Perhaps they were working out the best way to give him a brush-off. The Collective needed to trade with outsiders, so they would not want to be too brusque. Equally, they were obviously very protective of their most feted member.

  But at length Gris said: “There is a difficulty.”

  Oleg stirred on his mattress. The suit was starting to chafe—it was not built for lounging around in. “What sort? I’m here, aren’t I? Why can’t I have a moment with Rhawn? Is she unwell?”

  “No,” Gris answered carefully. “Rhawn is perfectly well. But she is not here.”

  “I don’t understand. She can’t have left Mercury—no one would have missed that. And the Collective is all there is. Has she gone off on her own?”

  “Not exactly. But you are wrong in one matter. The Collective is not all that there is. Or at least, it isn’t any more. There has been…” And now Oleg had the sense that Gris was choosing its words with particular care, and not a small measure of distaste, as if it found the whole business painful. “A division within our ranks. The formation of a second caravan. A breakaway movement, springing from within the Collective.”

  Oleg listened intently. His masters either knew nothing of this, or they had failed to brief him adequately. “When, what, how?”

  “It would probably be easier if I showed you,” Gris said.

  * * *

  Soon the caravan had fallen behind them, receding over the horizon until even the stallion and the balancing woman were lost. Their shadows, Oleg noticed, were slowly lengthening, stretching ahead of the fast little surface vehicle Gris had commandeered. Mercury was a small world and they were covering ground very rapidly, pushing the Sun toward the horizon. Beyond, but closer by the moment, was the transition zone of the terminator and the extreme cold of the unlit face. He thought of his delicate little ship, how far he was from it now, how totally at the mercy of his cyborg host.

  “Tell me about Rhawn.”

  “There’s not much to say. She was always restless—in her art and her soul. It’s what brought her to Mercury. She found contentment with us, for a while. But always there was that need to push against her own limits, to break out of existing formalisms. It was only a matter of time before she attached herself to the Totalists.”

  “The breakaway movement?”

  “Of course.”

  “You said they’d formed a second caravan. Do they move around Mercury, the same way you do?”

  “Most of the time. They’re camped now.”

  “What’s so special about them, that Rhawn had to leave the rest of you? Aren’t you radical enough?”

  “They are purists. Extremists, if you will. We have accepted extensive physiological alteration to adapt to life on the Playa. It enables us to work almost without restriction, to submit ourselves to the act of artistic creation. But even we have limits.”

  “Really?”

  “Our bodies and minds are still hampered by the design compromises of biology. In the Totalists’ view, that makes us inefficient and in need of radical improvement.”

  “What could be more efficient than you?” Oleg asked.

  “Robots,” Gris said.

  At length they traversed the terminator and entered the starlit nightside of Mercury. In his suit Oleg felt nothing of the precipitous temperature drop, seven hundred awesome kelvins of it, but the faceplate markers recorded the transition from appalling heat to appalling cold clearly enough, and now the suit was having to work just as competently to keep him from freezing to death. He supposed that Gris’s life-support mechanisms were coping with a similar shift in demands.

  “They keep away from us, mostly,” Gris said. “We aren’t enemies, as such. We are obliged to conduct a certain amount of business, and of course the Totalists have no contact with the outside world at all. On the rare occasions when they need something, they have to rely on our cooperation. But I would not say our relationship is an easy one. There have been … acts of artistic sabotage. Denied, of course. But it’s no secret that the Totalists view our work as decadent, corrupted, mired in a state of creative exhaustion.”

  “I suppose it was inevitable,” Oleg said. “There can’t have been an artistic movement in history that hasn’t eventually fractured into two or more creative poles. If it’s any consolation, they’ll have their own splitters sooner or later!”

  “No,” Gris said. “It’s no consolation at all. We made something beautiful here, Oleg. There’s no reason in the world it had to break up like this.”

  * * *

  As they approached the Totalists’ encampment Oleg was struck by how profoundly the scene resembled an exact negative image of the dayside caravan. The sky was a nearly faultless black, its perfection only marred (or improved upon, perhaps) by a sprinkling of stars and planets, the great glittery arch of the Milky Way and the faint dust haze of the solar system’s zodiacal light.

  Whereas the caravan had moved under the full blaze of day, here the only lights were those provided by the Totalists themselves. The encampment was smaller than the caravan, but the essentials were similar: it was a cluster of things which could be dragged or self-propelled across Mercury, when the time came to move. They also had sails and pennants, except that these were picked out in edges of colourful neon: reds and yellows, blues and greens, purples and oranges. The figures moving around the camp’s periphery were also outlined in bright hues. Oleg had been expecting something austere, but the proliferation of colours and shapes elevated his spirits.

  “It’s marvellous!” he said.

  Rising from the illuminated camp was what Oleg took to be a piece of large-scale art in the same spirit as the stallion and the balancing woman. It was a cluster of spires, or perhaps a single main spire attended by a large number of smaller ones, linked by a connecting tissue of arches and flying buttresses. The pale structure had a knobby, rough-cast haphazardness about it. It might almost have been glued together from millions of sea-shells, or fossils.

  “The Bone Cathedral,” Gris said, with a hint of dismissiveness.

  “Do they move that around with them? It looks much too fragile.”

  “No, it stays fixed to this spot. They’ve been building it for several years now. The day and night cycles don’t seem to do it any harm. When it is time for a new Totalist to complete their crossing, the caravan circles the Bone Cathedral.” Gris applied the brakes and brought the vehicle to a halt. They were still a decent kilometre from the Totalist encampment. “You’d best go the rest of the way yourself.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You need do nothing. They will either talk to you or ignore you. They already know that you are here.”

  He disembarked from the vehicle. He looked up at the goggle-faced creature that had become his companion, fully aware that if Gris abandoned him here—and the Totalists disdained to help—he would be in a great deal of trouble. They had come much too far for the range of his suit.

  “I would not be too long about it,” Gris warned.

  So Oleg wandered across the black Playa. His suit projected a terrain overlay. It was still functioning properly. He kept looking back, making sure the vehicle and the cyborg still waited. But Gris remained. And as the Totalist camp loomed larger, so one of the neon forms broke away from the blaze of colour and came loping over to meet him.

  The thing had arms and legs, a body and a head in roughly the right proportions, but there was no possibility that it was anything but a robot. There was no room in it for anything human. The thing’s chassis was an open exoskeleton, offering an easy view of its internal mechanisms. Oleg saw lots of machinery in there, much of it lit up and flashing in pretty colours, but there was nothing that looked biological. Its head was a cage that he could see all the way through, only loosely stuffed with instruments and modules.

  “I’d like to speak to Rhawn,” Oleg said confidently.

  “Who are you, and why have you come?” The robot’s voice, picked up by his helmet, was lighter in tone than that of Gris.

  “I am Oleg. I’ve come from Jupiter to offer Rhawn a moon of her own and the chance at reverse cyborgisation—to become fully human again.”

  The robot emitted a noise like fading static. It took Oleg a moment to realise he was being laughed at.

  “Go home, meat boy. Be on your merry way.”

  “I realise that my offer’s likely to be rejected. But my masters won’t be satisfied until I have the answer from Rhawn herself. She’s here, isn’t she? I won’t take more than a few minutes of her time.”

  “Your timing,” the robot said, “is either very fortuitious or very poor.”

  “My timing is sheer luck,” Oleg said. “Until just now I didn’t even know that Rhawn had joined the Totalists.”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “I was told…”

  “Rhawn has commenced her second crossing. But until it is complete, she will not be one of us. It will happen soon, though. We are confident in the force of her conviction. It is certainly much too late for reversal.”