Chapter 19

34 YAL

Brushing wood chips from my legs, I looked up to see Zuri appear between columns of black spruce trees with the white bulk of a facto following at her heels. As she drew closer, I read her stride as less walk than strut. Her full lips cast into a smirk, bouncing on the balls of her feet, everything about my sister wordlessly communicated I know something you don’t.

Forbidden to us as children, the boreal forest had become a popular destination for my daughters during our summer migrations. Elevated on a rocky rise a few meters above the woodland, the site provided a spectacular view of the small streams flowing down the curve of the habitat, glittering under the lightline as they separated and rejoined on their way to the ringriver. Along the way the tracery of water had carved out a multitude of small, forested islands from the landscape, each a biome unto itself.

Kirra and Ananya had left early in the morning to visit an islet hatchery that was home to uncountable numbers of butterflies – gold-and-black Mormon fritallaries, tiny, ghostly Columbia silver blues and wood nymphs – that emerged each spring to live genetically accelerated lives before microwinter closed in. Accompanied by her facto, Zuri had gone off to conduct more research into our home. Hotene, as always, had left by herself to test a birchbark canoe that she’d finished the previous summer.

“Isotopes,” Zuri said, coming to a stop in front of me.

“Huh?”

“Isotopes,” she repeated, her smirk turning into a triumphant grin. “In the water.”

I shook my head. “I don’t follow.” Standing up, I brushed away the last of the curled pink wood shavings that still clung to my skin.

Surviving Longshot’s launch half-uprooted, the lone western red cedar at the outcrop’s peak that had served as our family’s lean-to shelter for more than a decade had finally succumbed to its fate, felled by a brief but intense winter storm the previous year. After the facto’s whirring digits had separated the bulk of the tree from its splintered base, I’d stripped a segment of the long, straight trunk and started to carve, with no particular plan in mind. We never stayed in one place long: it would take multiple visits over many years for me to finish whatever the sculpture finally became.

“The Founders couldn’t make all the water Longshot needed.” Zuri’s words came out fast, tumbling over each other in her excitement. “I mean, they probably could, but it would have been a lot of work. Much easier to mine it.”

More confused than ever, I felt my frown deepen as I struggled for understanding. “Mine, not ... drill?”

She nodded. “Exactly. I just finished my last assay. It confirms everything I’ve found so far.” Responding to a silent command, the facto that had been following her wheeled and turned as it brought its four upper limbs together, digits spreading like the petals of a lotus. A projected image sprang up between us, a familiar Ship rendering of Old Sol in logarithmic scale: the four inner planets huddled closely around the warmth of a yellow star, the cooler gas giants orbiting distant and serene.

“If Longshot’s water had been lifted from the inner system, or anywhere nearby –”

A thin, partially transparent red torus, its outer and inner edges not quite enclosing the ellipses of Venus and Mars, swept through the orbit of our home planet.

“– the isotopic profile of its hydrogen would have looked like this.” A bar chart, its values meaningless to me, appeared in the air above the renderings. Zuri smiled, holding back her secret. “But it doesn’t. I’ve sampled the water everywhere we’ve been the last two years: in the ringriver, snow from the bow mountains, even rain in Amazonia. It’s all the same. The profile looks like this.” Another chart, equally inscrutable to me but clearly different, overlaid itself on the first. “Solar wind changes the levels of isotopes in the water,” she explained. “Ananya helped me with the math. The further you get from a star, the lower the ratios. The Founders extracted ice from comets billions of years old, formed when Old Sol was new. They melted the ice to create Longshot’s water, but couldn’t hide where it came from. Which was...” The red torus grew outwards until its inner curve was well outside the orbit of Mars, its thickness expanding to contain the asteroid belt and Jupiter. “Out here.”

“Hmm.” Leaning forward, I stared at the rendering.

“I’m still refining the data,” Zuri added, her tone apologetic. “I’d like to narrow the range further.”