Nilis commented absently on the colors. “That’s to do with a difference in surface composition. Much more water ice on Charon’s surface . . . it’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it, Ensign?”
“Yes, sir.” So it was.
They had come here in search of the “gravastar” technology, hints of which Nilis had dug out of the Archive on Mars. Pirius peered at the double world, wondering what he was going to have to confront here before they got what they wanted.
A Virtual swirled before them, coalescing from a cloud of blocky pixels. It was a short, plump man dressed in the drab costume of a Commissary. His belly was large, his legs short, his shaven head round and smooth. The Virtual image was projected clumsily, and the little man seemed to be floating a few centimeters above the floor.
When he saw Nilis and Pirius, this figure barked a nervous laugh, and small hands fluttered before him. “Welcome, welcome! Welcome to Pluto-Charon, and our facility. My name is Draq. You must be Commissary Nilis—and are you the ensign from the Front? I’ve watched all your Virtuals.”
Pirius had seen some of these. They were cartoonish renderings of Pirius Blue’s maneuvers around the magnetar, produced for popular consumption by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Pirius didn’t recognize much of himself in the lantern-jawed, shaven-headed, Doctrine-spouting caricature that shared his name. “Don’t believe everything you see, sir,” he said. “And besides, the whole episode has been edited out of the timeline. It won’t happen.”
“Oh, but that hardly matters, does it? In the Library of Futures that sort of editing goes on all the time. But I’ve always thought that potential heroism is as admirable as actualized.”
Nilis broke in. “Draq, you say? You’re in charge here?”
Draq blustered. “Yes and no! There are very few of us curators, you see, Commissary Nilis, and we have been here rather a long time. Things are, well, informal.” His hands fluttered again, and the Virtual drifted until it collided silently with the hull, and pixels flared across his round back. “You’ll have to forgive my excitement. We don’t get many visitors.”
“I’m not surprised,” Nilis said dryly, “since your facility doesn’t officially exist.”
Draq pulled a mock-solemn face. “It is odd, I admit, to be a legal paradox! But the work is fascinating enough to compensate, believe me.”
Pirius felt a tightening of his gut, a subtle shifting of the universe around him as the corvette’s drive cut in. Pluto-Charon slid silently across his field of view.
Draq said, “I have requested your crew to bring you down at our spaceport at Christy. Oh, we’re so excited!” He blurred, and crumbled out of existence.
Pirius said, “Commissary, what kind of place is this?”
“Wait and see, Ensign. Wait and see.”
The final moments of the descent were unremarkable. Pirius glimpsed a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon, but as Christy itself approached the flitter flew over ravines and ridges. Here, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer.