After another half-day they came to a stretch of open, ice-free landscape, and they clambered out of the rover to explore. It was some kind of volcanic province, Yuri saw, with hot mud pools, and slicks of heat-loving bacteria that showed up a brilliant purple and green in their lights. So this was where the local warmth came from. Their breath steamed in the chill air, but Yuri could feel the warmth of the ground under his booted feet. They all wore head flashlights, which made them look like ghostly alien visitors in this calm, dreaming place. The ColU and Stef happily took samples and made images.
‘Life all over,’ Liu said.
‘Everywhere you go,’ Stef agreed. ‘There’s surely life even under the ice, on the bottom of the covered ocean, wherever there are hot springs, mineral seeps. The same as on Earth.’
‘And stromatolites,’ the ColU said.
‘What?’ Stef straightened up, sample bottle in hand. ‘Impossible. Not in the dark. You need photosynthesisers to build stromatolites.’
‘But here they are,’ the ColU said mildly.
It was true. Rising to the west of the bacteria garden, the landscape was covered with shapes like huge mushrooms, with broad tops and wide, deep stems anchored firmly to the ground.
They walked over. Stef stabbed a sampling tube into one big specimen, an unhesitating gesture that made Yuri wince, and extracted a cross-section sample that she inspected by the light of her head flashlight. ‘You’re right, ColU,’ she said. ‘Kind of. This is a stratified bacterial community. The upper layers do look like they are photosynthesising – by Alpha light presumably, it must be a very slow process. But further down I think we have mineral chompers, like the heat lovers in the mud pools. Call it a stromatolite, then, but of a strange, complex sort.’
‘And unimaginably ancient,’ the ColU said. ‘There would be nothing to disturb them here. No predators. And all of this must be a kind of surface expression of the deeper community, the deep hot biosphere, which won’t care if it’s on the day side or the dark.’
Yuri grunted. ‘I wonder what they think of all the fuss we make up here, then.’
The party spent a day at the site, observing, gathering samples, reflecting and hypothesising. Then they packed up and moved on.
CHAPTER 77
The rumble of the heavy vehicles’ passing made the deep ground shudder, briefly.
This unusual event was detected by vast, diffuse senses. Aeon-long dreams were interrupted.
The event was noted, a record of it seeping out through the communities in the deep rocks, where it was interpreted, classified, stored. Nothing came as a surprise to a mind that had already been two billion years old before the first complex cell had arisen on this world.
The vehicles soon receded, the disturbance was over. And in the chthonic silence the Dream of the End Time resumed.
CHAPTER 78
Penny Kalinski woke to the sound of laughing children.
In her life, she’d been woken up worse ways, she supposed. Even if the world was threatening to implode around her.
She checked the clock. It was a little before seven fifteen, dome time. Or Paris local time, officially, but dome time was the way she thought of it; sealed up down here in Earthshine’s bunker, living off an enclosed life-support system, she may as well have been in some hab on Mercury or the moon.
She pushed her way out of bed and padded through to the small living room, where Jiang Youwei lay in his fold-out bed. Jiang was sleeping soundly. He would sleep even through an alarm – though the one time there had been a genuine problem in the months they’d spent buried down here, when a siren had sounded a warning of contaminants in the recycled air, he’d been on his feet in a second, his military training kicking in.
Penny went through to the bathroom, and stood under the hot, faintly stale-smelling water of the shower. They only had the two rooms, plus the bathroom; Earthshine had colonised only a small stretch of the old Channel tunnel, and living space, along with power, air, water and food, was always at a premium. At that they were privileged to have private quarters at all, not to have to share the big dormitories and shared bathrooms that had been set up to accommodate everybody else.
And the tunnel was crowded now. The inmates were mostly families of support staff and of Earthshine’s drafted-in experts, and the children, grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren of Sir Michael King, hastily flown in after the Splinter break-up and the closing in of the long cold – the Mighty Winter, as Earthshine called it.
Mindful of limited resources, after a brief shower Penny cut the water and dried off briskly.
Back in the living room the lights were bright. Jiang was up and about, flipping through pages on his slate with a practised finger. He had set a pot of coffee brewing in their small galley corner. As she passed, he absently handed Penny a full mug.
She pulled her clothes out of their small closet. She wore ISF-issue coveralls, self-cleaning and self-repairing, and all she had to do was shake out the detached dirt every day, a great saving in laundry water. She asked Jiang, ‘Busy day?’
‘Getting busier,’ Jiang said, studying his slate. ‘Maintenance this morning, some diplomatic stuff around noon . . . I will have a late finish. You?’
‘The school this morning, as I recall. After that – well, it depends on the Council resolution at lunchtime, and the fallout from that.’ The latest phase of the ongoing Council of Worlds talks was due to report back today.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Big day. I guess I’ll see you there.’
Though they were tucked away down here in this hole in the ground, as guests of Earthshine they were intimately connected to developing world affairs. The bloodless war between China and the UN nations had moved to a new phase in the months since the Splinter had arrived at Earth, and its dust had plunged the world into a sudden winter. A few resulting border conflicts had been easily contained. To the chagrin of Sir Michael King the rebellion against Chinese rule in Australia had been stomped upon; since then martial rule had been imposed on that continent, and vast numbers of native Aussies had been shipped out to other Chinese provinces in Indonesia, and further afield.
Across the Earth, indeed across the solar system, a new, uneasy truce had been called, and it still held, just about.
But now a new round of talks had begun, under the nominal chairmanship of the three Core AIs, Earthshine among them, who had emerged from their reclusive hideaways to offer a neutral platform on which negotiations and attempts at conciliation could begin. These were the so-called ‘Council of Worlds’ talks, usually restricted to the Earth but sometimes, in lengthy sessions incorporating time delays, with representations from Mercury, Mars, even Ceres. The chair was rotated mostly between Ifa and the Archangel, the AIs based in central Africa and South America respectively.
Sir Michael King, nearing his century but still in his chair at the head of UEI, was a key contributor. Penny had duties as an adviser on kernel physics. Jiang, one of the few Chinese down here in the tunnel, was expected to support the sessions with interpretation work, as well as reporting back personal impressions to New Beijing.
Well, the talks had ground on. Now there was a package of measures which seemed all but acceptable to most of the parties on the table: a mutual security pact; a tentative deal on the perpetual sticking point of the sharing of resources and information, including some Chinese access to kernel science; Earth to be designated a protectorate by both sides, the home of mankind ruled off-limits as a theatre of war. Whether any of it was going to be accepted was another question.
By the time Penny had finished her coffee, brushed her short hair, and was ready to go, Jiang had left already.
Outside, embedded in its tunnel, Earthshine’s little kingdom was beginning another day.
The big wall-mounted fluorescents, having been dimmed to match the waning of the daylight outside, were back up to full brightness. At this time of day people were on the move, a few night-shift workers standing down, the rest prepari
ng for the labour of the day. Most of the work was maintenance of the systems that kept them all alive down here. A couple of the wall screens showed images from around a wintry planet, and on the rest there was a constant feed from the round-the-clock Council of Worlds talks.
Overall the big tunnel refuge had undergone a drastic and rapid transformation. When Penny had first arrived it had been little more than a kind of computer store, survival shelter and information node. Now, as the families had been moved in, the IT gear had been removed from the public areas, and living spaces had been set out: dormitory and toilet blocks, a small hospital, even a school for the kids.
And at this time, before the start of the working day, the school playground was full of noisy kids, climbing frames and rope swings, playing games like hopscotch, their voices echoing from the concrete walls of the tunnel. Penny watched them with a kind of wistfulness, part of her longing to shed the weight of her own decades and join in. But she noticed how pale they were, cooped up down here, cut off from fresh air and sunshine: a winterbound Paris, under its dismal dust-choked sky and riddled with refugees, wasn’t safe for children. The kids’ health was carefully monitored, but it seemed to Penny they were growing up with a kind of frantic energy that had to be burned off regularly, like a flare from a gas well.
‘We have become like a space station, buried in the ground.’ The grave voice was Earthshine’s. His virtual stood beside her dressed in the usual sober business suit.
Penny said, ‘I think we’ll have problems if we’re stuck down here too long. Up on Mars, say, you grow up knowing that there’s no escape. Whereas here the kids know there’s a liveable environment up there, outside. When they get older, if we’re still here, we’re going to have a lot of difficult teens.’
‘Interesting. I retain enough of my humanity, I think, to sympathise. The need for personal freedom seems to be ingrained in the human animal, to some extent. We accept compromises where it benefits the family. Beyond that, we resent.’
She had to smile. ‘Is this how you talk to the kids in your school classes?’
‘Not exactly—’
‘Hey!’ A little kid had come up to the fence before them; he had oriental features but a thick Australian accent. Without warning, he took a ball and threw it straight at Earthshine. The ball passed through Earthshine’s body unimpeded, but there was a spray of multicoloured pixels. Earthshine folded slightly with a grunt of discomfort, and his overall image flickered subtly as the consistency routines in his infrastructural software strove to recover.
The kid laughed and ran away. Earthshine, back to normal, smiled indulgently.
‘Come on,’ Penny said, irritated. They walked away from the playground. ‘You shouldn’t let them do that to you. It’s disrespectful.’
Earthshine shrugged. ‘Sooner that than they should fear me, my strange unreality. That is a key purpose of my presenting classes in the school, you know. We are selfish, we three of the Core. Sir Michael’s request to bring down his grandchildren with him changed all that, in a surprising way. Now I see it as my job to protect the children. In a way I think of all of you as family.’
This kind of interaction always seemed irritating and bizarre to Penny, as if Earthshine was trying to acquire humanity, and was telling her about it step by step in full detail. ‘Shouldn’t the children learn that it hurts when your consistency protocols are broken?’
‘I can live with it,’ Earthshine said heavily. ‘They will learn in time. Colonel Kalinski, I think you are mothering me again.’
That annoyed her. ‘What do you mean, again?’
‘It does not hurt greatly to have a rubber ball thrown through my virtual projection. It did not hurt greatly when my nine parents were merged into one, and I was born. It does not hurt greatly to be me, even though I am not human as you are. You should not pity me.’
‘I’ll try to remember that.’
He had sounded stern, aloof, inhuman. Now he grinned, infectiously. ‘But it is pleasant to be mothered, I admit that. And now, I see, we’re overdue to meet Sir Michael.’
King stood beneath the largest of the display screens. Leaning on his stick, ignoring the human bustle around him, he glowered up at the news feeds.
The screen showed a blizzard of images, as usual, and voices competed in the air. Penny let the morning’s data rush wash over her in its multiple streams, gathering an impression of the new day. Maybe this was how it was for Earthshine all the time, she wondered.
She picked out a demonstration in Anchorage, outside the Chinese embassy, to the richest of all the USNA states in the early twenty-third century. The demonstration was, of course, about the effects of the Chinese asteroid winter. Food shortages were already kicking in, in this year without a summer. In the new, modern cities like Solstice in the far north and south, the power supply had collapsed as the paddies and marshlands, wired to supply electricity from gen-enged photosynthesis, had faltered in the shadows of the sky. There were even new refugee flows, heartbreakingly familiar images of families drifting back to the mid-latitude areas once abandoned by their parents or grandparents during the climate Jolts. Even in Paris, Penny had seen a refugee camp set up on the dead grass of the Tuileries.
‘The Chinese got it wrong,’ King growled as they approached. ‘If they wanted to make some gesture of space power they should have stuck to slamming a rock into the moon. But to strike at the Earth itself like this – it’s hit people at a visceral level. You know, there’s a theory that the whole scheme was cooked up offworld, in some think tank on Ceres or Mars, maybe by second-generation colonist types who have no real sympathy for the Earth, who don’t understand how things are down here. As a geopolitical statement it might have seemed a logical thing to do, a finely engineered stunt. But as a human gesture they got it completely wrong.’
‘Well, not completely,’ Earthshine murmured. ‘We are still talking; we have still avoided all-out war.’
‘True. But that’s thanks to you and your siblings. And we’re not out of the woods yet.’ As usual when he felt under pressure, King looked tense, angry; Penny had learned he got restless in any situation he wasn’t fully in control of. ‘The Council of Worlds session is about to make some kind of statement.’ He glanced up at the screen. ‘Bah. Come with me.’ He led the way towards his own quarters.
She followed, reluctantly. ‘We both have duties. The school—’
‘What are you, Kalinski, suddenly some slave to routine? This is more important than anything else going on down here. And as for the school, Earthshine here can just send in a partial . . . Come on.’
CHAPTER 79
King’s quarters were like a villa, compared to the cramped single room Penny shared with Jiang. He had four roomy interconnected chambers, each fitted out with screens and decent furniture, as well as a luxurious bathroom and kitchen that Penny had only ever glimpsed. Then again, it had largely been King’s money and influence that had got this old tunnel up and running as a survival shelter so quickly; Earthshine had huge resources, but of a more specialised and distributed kind. Even Earthshine owed King favours.
As they entered, the room’s big display screen was dominated by a central image of an empty podium with a microphone stand, the centuries-old signal of a press conference waiting to happen. Penny wondered where the podium was, where this event was due to take place; it could be anywhere on the planet, even on the moon.
Penny took a seat alongside Earthshine. As ever, a servo-robot rolled around offering them coffees.
Penny asked, ‘So how far have they got?’
King sat upright on an armchair, hands wrapped around his walking stick. He glared at Earthshine. ‘He knows, better than I do, probably. Ask him. The UN Deputy Secretary General has a statement to make. Remember, you met her on Ceres.’
Penny was no politics junkie; she frowned, trying to think this through. ‘That means she’s making some kind of unilateral statement. Right? If she and the Chinese delegates aren’t appearin
g together. I’m guessing that’s not a good sign.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘She’s overrunning. That’s probably a good sign, if they’re still talking. Or not. Ah, what the hell.’ He rubbed his fleshy face, briefly seeming exhausted. Then he seemed to pull himself together with an effort. He turned on Penny. ‘So how are you?’
She grinned. ‘How do you think I am?’
‘No word from your sister, I guess. Even now, at this time of crisis.’
She shrugged. ‘Why should there be? The news of all this won’t even reach Proxima for four years.’
‘It’s a shame she’s so far away.’
She sensed he was probing for a reaction. She also sensed that he was only talking to fill up some blank time, before the Deputy Secretary General stepped up to that podium. ‘A shame, yeah.’
‘Of course you must miss her. You’re twins. You were supposed to share your lives.’
She shrugged. ‘To Stef, in some sense I didn’t even exist before she stepped into the Hatch. By going off to Proxima the first chance she had, she was saying goodbye to me, loud and clear.’
‘Tough break.’
‘You could say that. We talked about this before. I’m too old now; I have a leathery hide.’
Earthshine, sipping his own virtual coffee, said gravely, ‘I believe I can sympathise. I remember being human, but I am no longer human. My consciousness can easily be modified, reworked, replayed, edited . . . As perhaps yours has, or your sister’s. It is your unique misfortune, Penelope Kalinski, yours and your sister’s, that your personal timeline has somehow been tangled up in the mysteries of kernel physics.’
Penny thought that over. ‘Thanks. I think.’
King winked at her again. ‘You’re here, in this room, with me. You’re real enough. Forget the existential crap. You’ll be fine—’
And now there was movement on the screen, and they turned to watch. The Deputy Secretary General, slim, smart, very sombre, stepped up, holding a slate. She began to speak, and English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese subtitles peppered the screen. But a headline strap at the bottom, scrolling by, was all Penny needed to know what had happened.
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