While rummaging through archival CDs in search of the abbreviated form of my essay on Women Scientists in Fiction, I happened across a fragment of a sequel to Blueheart started around about the time the novel was published. Since it’s unlikely that I will carry on with it now – though it made entertaining reading – I am posting it here. The working title was Crucible.

Crucible: Chapter 1

Space lifted away from her. Night rose towards her. The ramjet’s great blunt maw shrank with unnerving rapidity.  But, compared to the planet’s bulk, its span was diminutive.  In the falling dropcapsule the ramjet’s captain closed her eyes and envisioned the unfurling of the scoops, the gathering fields arcing out around the planet.  Primed to gather matter ion by ion, they would gorge on the outermost atmosphere, a veritable banquet, compared to the thin gruel in intersystem space.  The aurora would flare bright as day, violet green and lilac as ions accelerated in the ramjet’s scoop field.

Her face felt damp;  she made her eyes open.  The screens before her were pearly blue with distant water.  The hostility she felt, measuring the scale of her ship against the planet below, unsettled her.  She thought: I consented.  To whatever it was, and for whatever reason, I did consent.

‘Biting one’s nails is a habit unbecoming in a captain,’ her lieutenant said from her side.  Terese was watching her with wicked eyes, in which floated slivers of pale, planetary blue. ‘And unreassuring to the crew.’

‘You hardly need reassurance,’ the captain said.

‘But you need to stop brooding about it. What’s done is done.’

‘If I could only remember what it was.’

‘Have you no trust in authority? No faith they’d have good reasons for sealing your orders until you got here.’

Cybele de Courcey did not answer, answer enough to anyone who knew her as well as her lieutenant.  The planet filled the screens now.  Clouds were scarcely paler than the sea, streaks and rosettes and medallions, formed by the Coreolis winds.  Along the equator, a ragged band of cloud marked the meeting of north and south.

‘So young, and yet so cynical.’ Cybele glanced sharply at her;  the other woman raised her hands. ‘Rather you than me, sister. Rather you than me.’

And why not you, Cybele thought, that is what you wonder. You are the senior, by eight years, eight years as spacefarers measure it, eight years in flight, in quicklife.  In biological time, as best could be measured, Terese was some years Cybele’s junior, having entered space younger, and travelled more widely.  And Terese had not been the only lieutenant more senior in the interplanetary service.  So why not Therese or one of the others.  Why Cybele?

What was it I agreed to do, here?

‘You come from here, don’t you?’ Terese said.  The question was something of an solecism amongst spacers, who were pleased to acknowledge no alliances.

‘I came from here,’ said Cybele. ‘A hundred and sixty years ago.’

For that was the true relation of spacers to their origins.  The places they came from ceased to be.  Time alone extinguished them. Even Terese was silent a moment, in acknowledgement of that.  Cybele turned her attention to the seas.  Their texture was just becoming apparent.  And the texture below the surface, the duskiness of the floating forests, the green stain of the drifting plankton.  A stippling of islands twinkled in the edge of the twilight, as the planet turned into dusk.  The islands had not been settled then.  They were settled now.  The sight comforted Cybele, that the land of Blueheart had not been shunned.

‘Much different?’ Terese said.

‘No.’

Terese leaned forward, the light of the screens on her face.  ‘I hope they’ve kept their drop-platforms maintained this past fifty years.’

‘They will have had insystem traffic,’  Cybele said. ‘And probably low-C cruisers from lambda Serpens II. Private traffic.’

‘You think they’d risk blackout themselves by offering contact?’

She knew it;  lambda Serpens II was the primary source of the Space Service’s knowledge of what had happened in the fifty years since the blackout.  She said, dryly. ‘They would have to do a great deal more than break the blackout, since they are now the waystation for further exploration in this direction.  The Service cannot shun both worlds, and the inner worlds know that.’

‘You’re saying gamma Serpens V would not have been blacked out if there had not been an alternate waystation so close?’ Therese, ever swift, extrapolated the unspoken thought.  ‘Even after what they’ve done?’

Cybele could feel the first faint pressure of the slowing of their descent, a thusting of the seat against her spine.  Rossby Gamma, the rafttown, was still a fleck on the ocean beneath her.  It had not even been conceived of before she left.

‘I wonder,’ Therese said, ‘if it is as bad as they say on Earth.’

I wonder, Cybele thought, what you will say when I tell you it happened because of me. ‘Initiating landing protocol,’ she said, instead.

—-

‘Gah!’ Therese said, ‘what is that stench.’

‘Algae,’ said Cybele.  The seas always smelled rank and faintly sour, with the emissions of the commonest algae.  In her space-struck youth she had watched landings from the observation areas, and seen the same grimace on every newcomer’s face. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

There were watchers on the deck now, looking down at them.  The minority were clad, the majority naked, or wearing paint silvery as a fish’s scales.  Almost to a one, their skins were dark: brown, black, or the raw red of the adaptive.  They were, she noted with some relief, all still two armed, bipedal, human; they looked hardly different from the people who had gathered to watch her departure, a hundred and sixty years ago.  She found herself searching for a familiar face, almost expecting her brother whom he had last seen crouching behind the barrier, one hand steadying his little daughter, the other pointing out Cybele.  Year-old Juniper would be an old woman now.  Karel had been dead for almost fifty years.

Therese said, on a breath, her eye following Cybele’s, ‘They look just like people.’

‘Of course they do.  It has only been six generations.’

‘That doesn’t limit genetic engineering.’ Therese pointed out. ‘Now that they’ve thrown out the rules.’

‘They did not,’ Cybele said, sharply, ‘throw out the rules.  If anything, they had to apply these rules even more stringently, since what they do now, they must live with for a very long time.’  I helped them draw up those rules, she almost said. ‘It is quite likely most of those people are adaptive-born. It was that that led to the blackout. Nothing else.’

There were nineteen settled worlds, now; there had been seventeen when she left. They were settled according to a millennial plan which allowed human adaptation to the planetary environment for as long as was required to accumulate knowledge and numbers to begin terraforming.  Adaptations were done after birth, or between conception and birth, done anew on each individual, in each generation; the germ-line remained human. Once terraforming was completed, the settlers would revert to human type, and reaffirm their membership in the vast, spreading family of humanity.

Only the settlers of Blueheart had chosen otherwise.  Had chosen, a hundred and seventy years ago, to preserve their planet as it was, a waterworld with a bare three percent land surface area.  To preserve themselves as many of them were, air-breathing sea-dwellers, swimmers and divers with the best possible endurance in distance and depth as could be achieved.  But even a hundred and seventy years ago, they had been discussing introducing their adaptations into the germ-line, so that they would breed true to themselves. Even a hundred and seventy years ago, they had been considering how far they might go in adapting themselves to their seas.

The first adaptive child had been born ten years after Cybele’s departure.  By the time she reached the training facilities on nu Boötes IV, word had come from Earth that Blueheart was to be quarantined: the information streams which linked the settled worlds – the sunstreams – blacked out, all starships instructed to avoid the system.  For the last fifty years – since Earth’s decree had reached the other settled worlds – Blueheart had been alone in the universe.  But that had been all Earth could do. Despite nearly a millennium of exploration and experimentation, humanity had failed to attain even 0.5 c in their immense ramjets.  The forty-two light years between Earth and its unruly offspring represented a hundred years in transit time, and almost immeasurable expense.  Earth had no physical authority over Blueheart.  But the blackout prevented Earth’s other settlements from knowing whether Blueheart’s revolt met with success, or disaster.

Rumour, of course, filled the vacuum.  Blueheart was home to monsters, sea-dwellers unrecognizable as human.  Blueheart primaries – non-adapteds – had risen in revolt, and soon, very soon, would petition to return to the fold.  Blueheart was on the verge of destroying itself in civil war. But the private sources of the Space Service told of a world prospering in its isolation, slowly but assuredly improvising its own destiny.  Cybele had, for conscience’s sake, cultivated those sources.  What Blueheart had become, she had allowed, if not made.

New arrivals still walked from the platform across an open sided bridge.  Insystem passenger flights would be few; there would be no point wasting luxury on them. Grey water heaved, uneasily, between the sheer sides of the drop platform and the sheer sides of the next, still settling from the violent shifts of air and water involved in buoying the platform against the thrust.  Even a small dropship, like theirs, could make an impressive landing.  But if these people waited to see liftoff, they would be disappointed.  The dropship would leave when they left, not before.  No one from Blueheart was going with them.

‘Don’t look down,’ she said, to Therese, seeing her gazing into the water with a sickly fascination, a slight greenish tinge around her mouth.  Therese, with her dark olive skin, and black eyes, looked more indiginous than she.

‘Everything’s moving,’ the other woman said, a little faintly. ‘Everything’s moving in different directions.’

‘You will feel better when you are off the bridge.’

Therese looked at her, with wide, plaintive eyes.  ‘Is it moving too?’  Cybele took her arm, and kept her walking.  Therese tucked Cybele’s arm more firmly around hers.  On their last ship, they had been lieutenants and – in the time outside coldsleep – friends.  That had had to change.  Ramjet crews numbered at most forty, who might be exclusively in each others’ company for years, if not decades.  Their internal ecology, human and mechanical, was delicate.  A captain who risked disturbing that delicate ecology, for love or friendship, was a fool; Cybele had worked for fifty years to become a captain, and she was no fool.

She glanced sideways at Therese as they reached the end of the bridge.  The fine olive profile stared straight ahead, smiling slightly, despite the pallor of her lips.  Beyond Therese, Cybele saw people watching her.  Dear God, she could not possibly be recognized, not after all these years!  Reduced gravity would keep even her waking years off her face; she would look more like young Cybele than she should.  But her hair, brown in her youth, was grey-shot according to the custom of spacer captains.  And then she realised suddenly and with dismay that neither she nor Therese had thought of her hair when they carefully removed all insignia from their dropship, and all identifiers from their clothes.  Where were her wits! Therese had turned to look at her, concern in her eyes.

‘Remember something?’

‘No.’  The sealed orders remained quiescent within her cercortex. ‘It’s my hair,’ she said.

Therese considered it. ‘What about it? It’s a mess.’

‘It’s grey.’

Two generations had passed since the last ramjet had come to Blueheart.  Would even those who had been alive at that time remember that captains greyed their hair. The people around her were bald, as in the manner of adaptives, or black haired, or their hair was dyed – engineered – flamboyant, unnatural colours. ‘I should dye my hair.’

‘Or cover it,’ Therese suggested. ‘Where’s the nearest shop? You can order a scarf.’

‘In a little while,’  Cybele said. ‘I need to do a download. Maybe it’ll unseal the orders and tell me what I’m doing here.’

‘Sensible idea,’ said Therese. ‘You download, I’ll shop.’

Blueheart’s isolation showed, she thought; the public access consoles no longer matched interplanetary standards, and the info-net itself was baffling.  She was accustomed to the ramjet’s systems, the most sophisticated net achievable, or to the vast, multilayered, self-indulgent sprawl of the settled worlds’ nets.  Blueheart’s interface was almost childish.  Her personal interface, painfully achieved, was visual, and the Blueheart interface formed within her mind as a collage of simple shapes in primary colours.  Towers and waves and fish.  She lifted one up, and found another layer of less simple shapes, still primary colours. Blueheart adaptives had been disdainful of cercortex implantation and augmentation.  It seemed they had not changed.  They must have let the net degenerate. She turned up another layer, and found that the shapes were yet more complex.  Interested now, she submitted a request for download – and found herself receiving a bolus of data as swiftly and crisply as ever from the ramjet’s computer.  Largely irrelevant data – about the ecology of the southern ocean.  That was the fish.  Somewhat more respectfully now, she explored what lay beneath the towers, which seemed the most logical place to start.

She was leaning against the wall, face turned up to the sun, reviewing what she had retrieved about Rossby Gamma, when Therese spoke from her side.  She opened her eyes, squinting.  Therese said, ‘Here, put on your present.’ The present was a square of brilliant crimson. ‘They call it seasilk. I think it postdates you.’

‘Yes,’ Cybele said, retrieving the data on the Blueheart silksnail. ‘By about forty years.’ She looked at the scarf.  The colour was nearly painful to the eye.  Therese said, ‘Think of it this way.  Who will look at your face?’

Cybele stared at her, caught by the almost aggressive tone in her voice.  Therese said, ‘I accessed a public station on the way.  Fascinating interface by the way; deceptive as hell.  I looked you up.’ She paused, waiting for a response, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Would you,’ Cybele said, after a moment, ‘If you were I?’

‘I’d have told the closest friend I have.  And, unless I’m much mistaken, I’m yours.’

‘Will you believe me if I tell you that I do not remember as well as I might. I had a lot of enhancement work – I wasn’t born with a very good substrate brain for high level cortex implants, and I needed – rewiring.  It left me with a rather unclear recall of why I did what I did.  What I did was, of course, public record, though people – friends – did their best to efface my part in it, knowing that I wanted to make a life off Blueheart.’

‘It was a challenge finding out,’ Therese said, ‘true. But I am damned near an expert, and nobody seemed particularly bothered to bar access to your record, just to ‘efface’ it.’

‘The idea of barring access was particularly ugly back then.  There had been too many secrets.’

‘The illegal adaptives.’

‘And the virus that was released to destroy them.’

‘Where are you going?’ Therese said sharply, catching her as she started to move off.

‘There’s something – someone – I’d like to see down on the docks.’  She flipped the headscarf over her head and started to tie it.  Therese said,  ‘Oh, hell, let me.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t blaspheme in my hearing,’ Cybele said mildly. But she let Therese tie the scarf for her. ‘I think you should come; you might be interested.’

—-

‘This is him?’  Therese said.

A man standing alone at the edge of the docks.  Not a living man, a statue, of dark cast metal, tarnished slightly red by the sea winds.  He stood, flat-footed, arms folded, staring out to the sea.  His eyes were small, nearly hidden by the folds of his face. His build was bulky, not quite sagging.  He was quite naked, except for, around his neck, a ruff of piled leis and strung shells, fluttering petals and soft rasping, yellow, blue, white, grey, living colours against the gunmetal-red of his skin.

She circled him slowly, not answering Therese.  When she knew him, he had been in his fifties.  He had been a hundred twenty six when he died, a fair age, though not a great one.  This statue showed him somewhere in between, at the height of his powers.  She murmured, irreverently,  ‘Put on a little weight, did you, Rache?’  The fresh decorations showed how well he was remembered, how well loved, by both land and sea.

Something bright as one of the flowers around Rache’s neck fell with a flutter past Cybele’s head.  Perched on the statue’s bald head, the bird regarded Cybele with a bead of an eye as black as the living man’s had been.  Wind shivered through its iridescent blue feathers;  sun shone on its small, ivory crest.  Little naked feet skittered on the smooth metal.  A gust of wind caught and tipped it;  the bird flirted ink-tipped wings, and was gone. Cybele turned to follow its flight.

‘What’s the matter?’ Therese said, dryly. ‘Never seen a bird?’

‘No,’ Cybele said, simply. ‘I have never seen a bird.’

Therese gestured.  ‘That’s him, isn’t it?  Rache Scole Blueheart.’

‘Rache of Scole, yes.’  She shook her head slightly at the statue. ‘“The Founder.”  They must have hung that on you posthumously.  They could not have done it while you were alive.’

‘That’s – grotesque,’ Therese said, staring at the statue. ‘Casting someone in metal. It’s like some kind of effigy.’

‘It’s fitting,’ Cybele said. ‘And accessible even to people who have, or want, no access to the records in the nets.’  She ruffled the delicate yellow petals of the topmost lei.  It must have been hung within the hour, since the intense sun had not wilted them.  ‘I wonder what you had to say about the birds.  You were such a believer in not interfering with the ecosystem.’

—-