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It wasn't the first time she had encountered such a reaction.

He made her a meal in his home, which was a multichamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn't based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.

Adamm's clothes were made from seaweed -- or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silklike threads and was the basis of virtually all the colonists' clothing and other fabric, as well as products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.

They talked tentatively while they ate.

Adamm made a minor living making pearl artifacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snufflike powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.

Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm's home, and he was used to its conditions.

Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low-gravity environment of Triton, and with antiaging mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony's life support. "We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity..."

The biosphere was just too small.

Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.

He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.

She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.

After the meal, they took a walk.

He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed, and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune's faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.

She said, "I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is... eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earthlike."

She glimpsed hostility on his face.

"Travelers like you have returned before," he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. "What does it matter if Triton is
Earthlike
or not? Madeleine, I've never seen Earth. Why would I want to?"

The little clash depressed her. Of course he's right, she thought; Earth must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations... We humans just can't maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.

While the Gaijin sail on.

As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.

She grabbed Adamm's hand; he recoiled from her touch. "There. Did you see that?"

Ne.
"...No."

There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. "It's not just a light in the sky," she said defensively. "It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus--"

"This is your war?" Adamm asked reluctantly.

"Adamm, the war isn't mine. But it is
real..."

A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth -- something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry that was high-pitched and complex, like a door creaking.

Then it flipped backward and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.

"War,"
Adamm said sourly. Then he sighed. "I suppose you mean well. But it seems so... remote."

"Believe me, it isn't. Adamm, I'm going to need your help. The headman won't see me. You have to help me convince people."

He laughed, not unkindly. He pointed down to the black water. "Start with them."

"Who?"

"The Flips. Try convincing them. They're people too."

She peered into the water, stunned.

He walked away. She had no choice but to follow.

The headman's office loaned her a hard-shelled suit, full of smart stuff and heating elements. She descended into the water, from a bay on the outskirts of the bubble city, through a hole neatly cut in the ice.

She fell slowly, in deepening darkness. She moved around experimentally. She couldn't feel the cold, and the water pressure here on this low-gravity moon was pretty low, but the water resisted her movements. When the hole in the ice was just a pinpoint of blue light above her, she turned on her helmet lamps. The beams penetrated only a few meters into the murk. She ran a quick visual check of her systems and glanced upward to see her tether coiling reassuringly up through the water, her physical link to the world of air and light above.

Deep-sea diving on Triton. She'd never liked swimming, even on a real planet.

She was alone. The colonists didn't take to the water much. Their deep ocean was just a resource, a mine, not a place to explore, much less play.

Something wriggled past her faceplate.

She recoiled. Her chin jammed against her air inlet, and there was a sudden decrease in pressure; her ears popped alarmingly.

She calmed herself down. It had only been a fish. She didn't recognize the species -- a native Earth type, or gen-enged for this peculiar environment?

She fell faster.

The murky dust grew thicker. It was probably organic debris, she had been warned: decomposed body parts, drifting down to the deep ocean floor. More critters and plants drifted up past her. There were strands of seaweed, what looked like tiny shrimp, more fish of a variety of shapes and sizes, even what appeared to be a sea horse.

There was a whole biosphere down here, gen-enged from Earth life. There was little photosynthesis: not enough sunlight for that. Most of the energy for life here came from the heat of Triton's interior. So the food chain was anchored in communities of exotic bugs clustered around smoking, mineral-laden vents, cracks in the ocean floor hundreds of kilometers from the light.

...She felt it before she could see it, as there was a sudden and unexpected nuzzling at her legs, soft, warm, curious. She twisted around in the water, tether looping.

It was like a dolphin, yes: a small dolphin, sleek body a couple of meters long, streamlined fur pure white, powerful flukesand stubby fins. But
he
-- there was a fully operational penis down there, beneath the sleek belly -- had a face that had littlein common with a dolphin's: a blunt rounded shape; a wide, stretched mouth; a nose squashed flat and the nostrils extended into two slits. Bubbles streamed from a blowhole at the top of his head. And the eyes were closed; she could make out no brows, no lids.

No eyes,
she realized. But what use were eyes, in this deep darkness?

This was a human, of course: or rather, a posthuman, gen-enged for this environment, the true, deep heart of Triton, far beneath the cold, attenuated huddles of the surface.

He swum around her smoothly, brushing her legs, feet, arms, chest. She heard a pulsing click, perhaps some form of echo sounding...

He rolled on his back.

Enough analysis, Madeleine.

Without thinking, she reached out with her gloved hand and scratched his corrugated, gunmetal-gray belly. She could feel nothing of the texture of his fur. But the clicks and pops he made deepened, seeming to denote satisfaction.

"Can you hear me? Can you understand?" Are you a Roach too, she thought, some remote, metamorphosed child of Ben and Lena?

For reply he wriggled away and floated there, just out of her reach.

She had to let herself drift a little deeper to touch him again. He let her stroke him a couple more minutes, then wriggled away again. And she had to descend farther, reach out again.

And again, and again.

He's testing me, she realized slowly. Playing some game with me. Psychology. Still human enough for that.

And, she saw by the swelling of his impressive penis, it was giving him a kick.

She rose up a little, folded her arms.

When he saw she wasn't playing anymore, he rolled on his front and his fins beat at the water, as if in frustration. But then he quickly forgave her and began rolling around her legs, nuzzling and butting.

More shadows in the water, she saw now: two, three, four Flips. They clustered around her curiously. She wondered if her first companion had called to them, in some manner she couldn't detect. She tried not to flinch as their powerful bodies brushed the equipment that kept her alive; they showed no malevolence, only a kind of affectionate curiosity, and her gear was surely designed to survive encounters like this.

Now one of them -- her first friend maybe, impossible to say -- began to emit a new kind of sound. It was a kind of whistle, much purer than the echo clicks or the squeaky-door groans she had heard before.

Another joined in, making a whistle that wavered a bit but soon settled on the same pitch as the first. And now she heard a pulsing, overlaid on their simple pure-tone singing. Beats, she thought, the interference of one tone with another.

The other Flips joined in, singing their own notes, producing more beats. As a piece of music it was simple, just a cluster of pure tones in straightforward harmony with each other. But the beats were more complex, an elusive pattern of pulses that shifted, hopping from one frequency to another, sometimes too rapidly for her to follow.

On a whim she activated a feed to her concrete cave room, up in the surface colony, and let the translator suite record the singing. Then she closed her eyes and let herself drift, immersed in song, oblivious even to the gentle touch of the Flips as they swam around her.

The Flips scattered, suddenly, as if in panic, disappearing into the gloom, leaving her alone. She felt shocked, oddly bereft; without the song, the world seemed empty.

But now she heard a new noise: a deep regular thrumming. Something was approaching through the water ahead of her, something massive, a texture that spanned the ocean.

It was a net.

She paced back and forth in Adamm's lounge. "What kind of people are you? Those Flips are your--"

"Children?" He smiled, languid, sipping a kind of wine whose principal ingredient was seaweed. "Cousins? Brothers, sisters? Don't be absurd. They are a different species. They became that way by choice. When they first went into the sea, they took tools, ways of extracting metal. They discarded it all, bit by bit. They even discarded their hands, and their eyes, everything that makes us human. They
chose
to go back, you see, back to... mindlessness. It was ideological."

She wondered how much, if any, of that was true. "But to hunt them down--"

He studied her curiously. "Do you imagine we
eat
them? You don't think much of us, do you? The Flips are just a pest. They disrupt the ecology. They interfere with the city's systems, the filter valves for instance..."

Perhaps, she thought.

The translator had analyzed the Flips' singing.

With no referents, it was impossible to provide a one-to-one translation. But it was obvious the song was full of structure. The suite identified patterns in the choice of frequencies, in the way the beats were manipulated, in their spacing and timing and intonation and pitch... The suite estimated that an hour of such singing could encode a million bits, which was, for comparison, about the information content of Homer's
Odyssey.

The Flips couldn't match the richness of the whale song of Earth. Not yet. A few more centuries, she thought, and they'd have it.

So the Song went on after all, here in this watery desert, a place even more elemental than the Outback.

Adamm was still talking. "...And you needn't imagine they are some kind of cute pet. Some of them have turned predatory, you know. Ecological niches tend to be filled...
They
consume each other. Look, they're just Flips. They don't matter."

"And nor did your ancestors, in white Australia."

His face hardened. "You created this world, I suppose, with your stunts, firing moons back and forth. And now you want to destroy it, evacuate thousands of people." He smiled. "History remembers you as a meddler. Grandiose. Ideas above your capabilities." But even as he spoke he seemed distant, as if unable to believe he was challenging this historical figure -- as if he were facing down Columbus, or Julius Caesar. He gazed out at interstellar darkness, the edge of the system. "If these aliens are as powerful as you claim, maybe we should just accept what's going to happen. Like death. You can't fight that."

She growled. "No, but you can put it off." She stood. "I'm not interested in your opinion of me, or your analysis. I'm going to see the headman, whether she likes it or not. I'll do what I can to arrange evacuation to the inner system for everybody who wants it. Even the Flips."

He eyed her, saying nothing; somehow she sensed this remote grandson of long-dead Ben and Lena wasn't going anywhere, with or without her.

"Good-bye, Adamm."

Good-bye, good-bye.