“Christy,” a very archaic name, turned out to refer to what the corvette’s pilots called the “sub-Charon point” on Pluto. This bit of ground was unique in Sol system. Like Earth’s Moon, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days these worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly. Within Sol’s domain, Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked; they danced like lovers.

And so this place, Christy, was forever suspended directly beneath the looming bulk of the giant moon, and the feeble geological energies of these small worlds had been focused here.

The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.

They arrived in a dome that was all but transparent. Charon, suspended directly overhead, was visible through the dome’s scuffed surface.

Draq was here in person. As agitated as before, he bustled up, grinning, as Nilis and Pirius approached. Eight more people stood behind him. Some, smoother-faced, might have been female, but they all looked alike to Pirius, round-faced and potbellied.

Draq’s robes were clearly old, heavily repaired, and he smelled stale. “Welcome, welcome again. We’re delighted you have visited us, and we’re ready to assist you any way we can. . . .” As the little man chattered on, Pirius wondered how true that was; Draq must be concerned his covert facility had even been noticed. His colleagues gathered around the Commissary like infants around a cadre leader. They reminded Pirius of the tiny isolated community on Port Sol: these characters weren’t so far from the sun, but they seemed even odder.

But they weren’t paying any attention to Pirius. He walked toward the dome’s clear wall and gazed out at Pluto.

There were clouds above him, wispy cirrus, occluding bone-white stars: they were aerosol clusters, according to Nilis’s briefing material, suspended in the atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines—although perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting away from Christy. Sol was a point of light, low on the horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cloud. The inner system was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Pirius to cover with his palm. It was strange to think that that unprepossessing blur had contained all of man’s history before the first pioneers had risked their lives by venturing out to the rim of Sol system, and beyond.