He probably spent too much of the journey back to Earth telling a bored Nicola Emry all of this.
Not that she had any hesitation in telling him what she thought about it. ‘You’re a gloomy old fossil in a young man’s body.’
It seemed a very long time before the Crab reached Earth.
10
At last the Crab docked at the Geostationary Node of the Sahel space elevator, in orbit over Africa. Here they had to wait for a tether-climber ride to the ground.
Poole and Nicola made their way to the Caravanserai, one of the Node’s larger public chambers. A sphere of engineered carbon and radiation-proofed glass, full of cafeterias and reception desks for hotels and other facilities – and filled with light from the Sun above and the shining Earth below – this noisy, crowded volume was a place for passengers arriving from Earth or sky to acclimatise, to meet up, or just to come and be a tourist. Suspended as the Node was in geosynchronous orbit, circling the Earth in precisely twenty-four hours, there was only microgravity to be experienced; rather like Gallia, the internal space was spanned by a spider web of guide lines, and children and adults hauled their way along the lines with expressions of alarm or squeals of delight, depending, Poole supposed, on temperament and experience.
Nicola burned her way through the Node’s facilities.
After a couple of hours she emerged from a pricy souvenir store laden with bags. ‘Look at this junk! I got you this.’ She held out a manikin, a muscle-bound man in a silver suit. ‘The Mariner from Mars. Little boys like you always wanted to be the Mariner, right? And look at these.’ A pair of earrings, with green tetrahedral frames for pendants. ‘And this!’ A Michael Poole facemask. ‘Merchandising already. Your father must be smiling – as long as he secured the copyrights . . .’
After that, Poole stayed in hiding.
He found a quiet lounge, with a view outside. Seen through wide windows in the floor, a handful of spacecraft floated like immense toys in the sharp, startlingly bright Earth-orbit sunlight: one of them was the Hermit Crab, its hull stained crimson and black by Io flux-tube muck and radiation damage. And below, elevator tethers stretched down like gossamer to an Earth the apparent size of a large dish held at arm’s length: a dish full of Africa.
He stayed here long enough to watch as the eastern coast headed into evening, the shadows of thin clouds stretching long. The terminus station of the tethers was lost in equatorial rainforests. Poole had seen images of how Africa had been in the days before the Recovery centuries – how, from space, you could actually have made out national borders in the straight-line edges between landscapes of different textures, here quasi-natural, here agricultural, here a desolation of war. All of it was gone now, the borders themselves washed away like the nations that had fought over them. But the renewed green was studded here and there with diamond needles: Towers, kilometres-high structures that could house as many as a million people in a single self-contained urban space, while making a minimal impact on the rest of the planet. A million living like colonists from space, it struck Poole now, on humanity’s native planet. Well, sooner that than the sprawl of the Anthropocene age.
But even the great Towers were details in that continental green.
As the reduction of population from its Anthropocene peak had cut in seriously, Poole knew, humanity’s target, at first an unconscious groping and finally a consciously realised, purposeful programme, had been to restore the Earth to something like its state at the end of the last great glaciation, thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago: long before the Neolithic and the farming revolution, even before Old Stone Age hunter-gatherers with their sharp blades and lethal hunting skills had so quickly overrun the planet. It had begun with very cautious programmes of carbon-dioxide drawdown – leading eventually to a Poole re-engineering of Antarctica. It had culminated in the rewilding of much of the planet. Poole wondered if any of the beasts restored to that huge, primordial landscape, the elephants and rhinos and the great apes, ever looked up at the peculiarly stationary star directly overhead, placed there by the same clever relatives who had brought them back from extinction.
Eventually Nicola found him.
Drifting in the air alongside Poole, she accepted a gratis flask of coffee from a passing bot. ‘Bored,’ she said.
‘You can’t stay still for a heartbeat, can you?’
‘How many heartbeats are we supposed to hang around here for?’
‘Harry said he’d meet us.’ Harry, with Shamiso, similarly had headed back to Earth at the first opportunity, on an uninfected GUTship. ‘He’s overdue.’
Nicola laughed. ‘Poor you. Did Daddy promise to turn up for your little-league baseball games, and never came?’
‘We played cricket,’ Poole said. ‘Not baseball. I grew up in Britain.’
‘I needed to know that. Well, he ain’t here, is he? So now what? I guess we’d better jump the line for the next car down to the ground.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ An elderly woman approached them, smiling at Poole. ‘Events are moving rather too rapidly for that. Welcome home, young Michael.’
She was shorter than either Poole or Nicola, stocky if not stout, and was dressed in a gown, colourful and tied at the waist, a little like a kimono, Poole thought. Her grey hair was pinned sharply back into a bun. Her face, broad, pleasant, was a mix, the skin olive, the eyes bright blue: a blend of the regional characteristics of mankind which, like the nation-states, had dissolved into history. She might have been fifty years old; it was impossible to determine age in an era of AS technology – and, Poole knew, it was particularly futile in the case of this individual. Poole hadn’t seen her approach. Suddenly she was just there. But Gea was always discreet about such things; her manifestations were never jarring. Always well mannered, he thought.
‘Gea.’ He smiled and nodded; she nodded back – any more physical gesture being inappropriate in the circumstances. ‘Did my father send you?’
‘No,’ she said wryly. ‘But I spoke to him. He had every intention of meeting you—’
‘Don’t make excuses for him. It’s kind of you to come meet us. Gea, this is Nicola Emry.’
‘Ah. The daughter of Shamiso? A good friend and colleague on the UN Senate. She speaks well of you.’ Gea bowed again.
Nicola bowed back, politely enough, but she laughed. ‘Somehow I doubt that. And what – apologies, who – are you? Some friend of the family?’
‘You could say that.’ Gea waved her hand through the thin line of a guide rope; her flesh broke up into pixels. ‘Ouch. Consistency protocols; the bane of my life. If I may use that word.’
‘You’re a Virtual.’
Gea smiled. ‘I prefer “differently conscious”. And rather elderly, though I have enjoyed more upgrades, over the years, than even Michael’s beloved Hermit Crab. In fact the first Poole I, or one of my ancestral intelligences, ever encountered was called George, and he was the uncle of a man you may have heard of: Michael Poole Bazalget.’
Nicola’s eyes widened. ‘The polar-stabilisation guy? That was back in, what, the twenty-second century?’
‘Twenty-first.’
‘Wow.’
Poole said, ‘Gea has been an influential figure in world affairs since – well, since Bazalget’s day. She was once one of the most powerful artificial sentients in the world, working at the heart of the great conservation and recovery programmes. All the stuff that’s now in the history books. In fact “Gea” stood for . . .’
Gea smiled. ‘Global Ecosystems Analyser. The name was the unfortunate result of a long-ago brainstorm at the University of Oklahoma. But I’m used to it.’
‘Gosh. I feel like I should ask for a picture with you.’
Gea laughed, a delicate sound. ‘I like her, Michael. A lack of deference. She’s probably good for you. Why are you travelling together, though?’
Pool
e frowned. ‘I’m not actually sure.’
‘Accident,’ Nicola said. ‘I was piloting my mother out at Jupiter, and now I’m piloting him. It’s turning into a fun ride. Though not if we’re going to be stuck in some space-elevator car for days.’
Poole said, ‘You said you had some news about that, Gea.’
‘Indeed. Urgent news, in fact. No need to wait for the elevator. Come this way.’
She led them out of the lounge and towards an airlock access gate.
Nicola asked quickly, ‘You’ve got us a shuttle?’
‘We – the Senate subcommittee handling this situation – believe that the environmental impact of an in-atmosphere flight is justified, in this case.’
‘Thank the gods for that. Can I fly it?’
‘Don’t push your luck,’ Poole murmured. ‘Gea, you said something about new events—’
‘It has arrived at Mercury. The entity you call the sycamore seed. Slowed there and stopped. Landed, possibly. It is not yet clear what it is doing there. There has been no communication, no response to our own attempts to contact it . . . But meanwhile, as for you, Michael, the news of your encounter with the silver-spheroid creature—’
‘We know.’ Nicola gleefully showed off her tetrahedron earrings. ‘It’s all over the place.’
‘It has caused quite a stir. A stir with you at the epicentre, Michael.’ Gea sighed. ‘Well, you’re a Poole. This kind of strangeness is part of the package, it seems. And after all it’s not the first time a Poole has come into contact with an irruption from – somewhere else.’ She eyed him. ‘I’m talking about Michael Poole Bazalget. In fact if not for that contact long ago it seems likely you Pooles would never have achieved the power and wealth you have.’
This was new to Poole. ‘What about Bazalget? What contact?’
But she would say only, ‘That’s family business. Ask your mother about the Kuiper Anomaly.’
That meant nothing to Poole, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been drawn, more or less reluctantly, into the deep family history. ‘I’m on my way to see her. I’m shipping her the amulet, the artefact brought by the Wormhole Ghost. If anybody can make sense of it . . .’
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to postpone that visit,’ Gea said gently. ‘More news. You’ve been summoned, Michael. Along with your father.’
‘Summoned? Who by? The government?’
‘Indeed. Specifically by a subcommittee of the World Senate, which has, considerately enough, agreed to convene in one of the Poole properties – the Goonhilly Mound, in Britain.’
‘The Senate.’ Poole clenched a fist. ‘You know, I didn’t want any of this.’
‘But you have got it anyhow, so don’t sulk,’ Gea said, admonishing.
Nicola laughed out loud.
‘Now, let’s find that shuttle. A Poole Industries ship, of course, built for the lunar run . . . Do you have any baggage?’
Even with Gea’s help, the journey down wasn’t that quick, and, Poole observed with amusement, Nicola was soon chafing with impatience.
It was morning by the time the shuttle had dropped them at the sprawling Terminus station at the base of the space elevator, in what was still known, for administrative purposes, as northern Nigeria. Nicola had clearly expected to be flown all the way to their final destination, but such was the caution taken over environmental impacts now that the few allowed flights to space took off and landed close to the elevators themselves.
From there you took a monorail.
As the three of them waited to board a small compartment in a northbound train, Poole saw Nicola peering up at the sky: the multiple elevator tethers ascending into the blue, the sparks of orbital habitats and factories visible even in the daylight – a more lurid glow, sliding over the sky, that was probably a profac collector, a sub-orbital craft scooping up wispy nitrogen from the top of the atmosphere for export to the growing arcologies on Mars.
‘You’re not used to any of this,’ Poole observed with some surprise. ‘I thought you were born on Earth.’
‘Grew up mostly on the Moon. And I was out of there as soon as I could steal a rock-rat shuttle and head out to the asteroids.’
‘Then as a pilot you must have been self-taught?’
She grinned. ‘I would never have been taught a lot of the stuff I do.’
After all the time they’d spent together, Nicola remained an enigma to Poole. ‘You turn down AS treatments. You commit crimes you’re dumb enough to get caught at.’
She laughed. ‘Wouldn’t call it crime. Just – playing. A bit of fraud and stuff, to get back at a few enemies of the family. A few enemies in the family.’
Gea sat with them as they settled in their compartment, an unreal flask of water set before her on a table as an integral part of her Virtual presence. Now Gea said gently, ‘I think Michael’s trying to work out why you’re so self-destructive.’
Nicola shrugged. ‘Look – I may have crashed out of my education, but I’m not dumb. I see the world as it is, that’s all. It’s full of artificial minds like you, who will always be smarter than I am, and a government that is run by a global class of old folk who are never going to die off and get out of the way. Like you, probably, Poole. So what is there to do but play nihilistic games?’
The train moved away now, smooth and silent. The buildings of the elevator terminus washed past, to be replaced by a primitive green. And as the forest thickened, Poole thought he heard an extraordinary, low rumble, a growl, almost geological.
Gea smiled at his reaction. ‘A lion.’
Nicola didn’t seem impressed. ‘Anyhow, after all of that escaping, here I am crawling around on the ground. I mean, a train all the way to England?’
Gea smiled. ‘It’s pretty quick. And wait until we pass from Africa to Europe, following the crest of the Gibraltar dam. One of the greatest of the late-Bottleneck engineering projects: a flood defence for the whole Mediterranean basin—‘
‘Whenever I’m on Earth I feel like I have to tiptoe, in case I wake the old folk.’
‘Well, maybe that’s not a bad analogy. But we know how precious Earth is now, if we didn’t before. Look at this journey, for instance. Who wants to rip everything up again, just to get from one place to another a little quicker?’
‘Oh, into Lethe with it. Just wake me when we get there.’ She tipped over, shoved a folded-up jacket under her cheek, leaned against the window and closed her eyes.
Poole just shrugged at Gea.
Gea laughed softly. ‘You know, Michael, she’s right. The world is a rather elderly place, these days. I remember when it was full of children. In the Bottleneck, the age of migration, children everywhere, and their parents barely any older. Of course we have had the beginnings of AS technology since Michael Poole Bazalget’s time – and remember to ask your mother about that, Michael.’
Ancient family secrets again. He felt vaguely alarmed.
‘But it’s only been in recent centuries that the demographic has changed enough for the elderly to – well, to dominate the discourse. Still, we will always need the young, or the young in spirit. It’s a necessary stabilisation. A trade-off between chaos and order. Just like you and Nicola. Is she really asleep, do you think?’
‘Probably.’
Gea smiled. ‘In that case she’ll regret not seeing that.’ She pointed out of the window and counted down silently, using her fingers. Five. Four. Three—
Before she reached ‘one’, Nicola sat up.
They were on a viaduct, crossing a valley through hilly country. A Tower gleamed, unearthly, its glass walls a faint chlorophyll green. And on a crest, silhouetted against the morning sunlight, the elephants were walking.
11
At Goonhilly, Harry himself met Poole and Nicola at the monorail station. There wasn’t room for them all in the small car he had
brought, so Gea, with a smile and a promise to meet later, winked politely out of existence.
They had a short ride now in the solar-power smart car, smooth and silent, through a largely empty landscape. This was the Lizard Peninsula, a south-west corner of the British Archipelago. Near the station itself the precarious ruins of houses overlooked a collapsed cliff, a grey sea. Long before they got to Goonhilly itself the familiar profile of the Mound was visible, a spindly, organic-looking tower, with a cluster of antique, carefully preserved radio antennae at its feet – as if the Mound were a skinny human, Poole thought, standing in a meadow of metallic flowers. Another memorial to the family’s complicated past.
During the ride Harry’s conversation was little more than a high-speed monologue. There were times, Poole realised, when he barely looked at his son and his companion at all, so wrapped up was he in his own agenda.
‘It’s good to have you here in person, Michael. Listen, there’s still a lot of interest in you just now. Which is to say, leverage for us.’ He grinned, his blond hair bright in the misty sunlight of a June day in England; Poole thought he looked remarkably young, for once. ‘But all this is clutter. We have to focus on the real goal.’
Nicola wasn’t about to put up with being excluded from the conversation. ‘And what goal is that, Harry?’
He glared at her. ‘The wormhole project, of course.’
‘But you can’t seriously consider continuing. Not now. The first time you opened up a wormhole, some kind of alien menace swarmed out, and your own son was proclaimed a messiah of the future. Wouldn’t it be better to wait?’
‘Look, we may or may not have aliens wandering around the Solar System. But the logic of the project, technological, demographic—’
‘Commercial,’ Poole put in dryly.
‘None of it has gone away. If humanity is to have a future in space we have to do this.’ Harry gestured, and Virtuals swam in the air, equations, graphs: little figurines to represent people in their thousands and millions, their futures evidently to be shaped by the Pooles’ schemes. ‘It’s already more than a thousand years, after a lot of half-assed exploration and failed pioneering, since we finally established respectably sized colonies off Earth: a few hundred each on the Moon, Venus and Mars, and so on. And they started to grow. On Earth, before the Anthropocene crash, population growth was around two per cent per annum. In space it’s been much slower than that, simply because of the lack of room to grow into. Think about it. If you want your colony to double in size, first you have to build a place for all those new folks to live. So the growth rate has been more like one per cent per annum.
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 6