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Ultimately the council came to a conclusion Wahram had foreseen hours before: as Wahram himself was so sympathetic to the Mercurials, he was to return there and see what the situation was, talk to the lion cubs and find out who the next Lion would be, and then also go visit the Vulcanoids and see what they had to say for themselves-see what they thought of the arrangement Mercury had proposed to Saturn. He was instructed to revise Terminator out of the deal if he thought that would work.

Probably he should have refused to do it based on his dislike for that last instruction, but it occurred to him that a different delegate might mean an even worse result for the Mercurials. And after all, the assignment meant he would very soon return sunward, which was interesting to contemplate. As for his instructions, he could see about that when he got there. In Alex’s realm in particular, an ambassador was again as of old, a diplomat at large, charged with making decisions as well as conveying them. By the time he got there it could very well be a different story. With a little forethought, he could be almost sure it would be a different story.

So he said nothing beyond a simple acceptance of the assignment.

At which point the Satyr of Pan stood to speak. “You must tell us if you think this effort will make trouble for the other projects Alex had going. Can you remind the council what’s at stake here, and how those projects are going in her absence?”

Wahram nodded stiffly as he thought over his response. He and the other Alexandrines were attempting to keep a low profile, and some of the council members had not paid enough attention to notice their projects’ authorization and budgeting inside larger expenditures. “Alex kept things separate in her calculations, so that won’t be a problem for us. Some other matters are being dealt with by a group centered around Wang and Inspector Jean Genette. We would need to go under a cone of silence to discuss all this in detail, but suffice it to say, Alex was heavily involved with a Mondragon project to help Earth cope with its various problems by ecological means. A lot of the terraria in the Mondragon are working on that, it has its own momentum, and we’ve agreed to help them. Then also there is an investigation going on into the role of qubes in some questionable activities, on Mars, Venus, Io, and elsewhere. This also will proceed no matter what happens with the Vulcanoids, which is only an above and beyond, although admittedly an important one.”

The council, not wanting to retire into the cone and be cut off from the cloud and radio, adjourned the meeting. Wahram returned to his room. His creche kept an apartment in a little block of apartments, all clustered around a square that was occupied almost entirely by Titans, with Titanic shops and restaurants. There he lived among his crechemates and enjoyed their support, which was so benign and understanding that life there much resembled living in complete solitude. As the days passed before the spaceliner that would take him downsystem arrived, he walked the city spine to the council meetings, he followed the work on Titan in daily consultations, and he did his share of Iapetus work in the kitchen of the dining hall on the ground floor of their building. He attended a concert series, joined the little group of musicians in the park, filled and emptied dishwashers. As he dodged diners and servers in the hall, the repeated minuscule navigational challenges reminded him of Proust’s comparison of a restaurant in action with the whirling planets of the solar system, which had struck him as fanciful (not to mention quite a scale shift between vehicle and tenor) until he had seen it for himself, in restaurant after restaurant: their affairs were elaborations of the second law of thermodynamics, Beckian diffusions of energy through the universe, and around they went in the great orrery of their lives. Soon he would descend sunward and seek out the Mercurial.

But then she called him. She was coming to Saturn, with Jean Genette; they wanted to descend into the clouds of Saturn to look for a spaceship possibly adrift in the big beauty’s upper layers. She wanted him to arrange the dive into Saturn, if possible, and then join them in it.

“That would be fine,” he replied; “I am at your disposal.” Which was certainly one way of putting it.

Lists (8)

Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, and Mimas; these are the moons that shepherd Saturn’s rings.

The rings are only 400 million years old, the result of a passing Kuiper belt ice asteroid being stripped to its core when it passed Saturn too closely.

Mimas, the bull’s-eye moon, is 400 kilometers in diameter, while its crater Herschel is 140. The Herschel impact nearly blew Mimas apart.