Early in the morning he was woken to take a secure call from Aviva in California.
“It was an inside job,” she told him. “A section of the military under the influence of a cabal of corporations, most involved in carbon.”
“Who?”
“General Degraves from South Carolina. He’s been in their pay for some years.”
“Why?”
“She was about to sign the new energy bill but had been alerted to an earmark that would allow corporations to establish militias. She vetoed it. One of the first things the VP did when he took over was sign it.”
“But we’ve known they’ve had private armies…” he objected, realising it was a naïve point.
“This sub-clause gave them quasi-legal status, certain immunities.”
“And Degraves…”
“Was to sub-contract his division to the cabal. Akash, you need to understand that the worst case scenario is now happening.”
He nodded to himself. “So this is a coup?”
“Effectively. The cabal now controls the US government.”
“And the next stage?”
“My information is that some of the other corporate cabals will retaliate, maybe the Russian oligarchs or the Chinese through the Hong Kong group, although I am hearing that a group on the east coast has established a formidable force of veterans and mercenaries supported by several state governors.”
“Are you suggesting a civil war…?”
“Is a very likely outcome, the tensions have been brewing for years, but this may spread. Other countries are on the edge. China, Russia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, are all internally unstable. It could become chaotic very quickly and smaller countries might use the confusion to settle old scores.”
“And our status?”
“Still somewhat under the radar but any hint of what we are up to and we can expect a lot of heat.”
“So you recommend code purple?”
“Yes, effective immediately.”
“Okay, do what you must. We can’t let this opportunity slip. You understand what is at stake.”
“I do.”
He sat at his desk until dawn; his mind racing through all the scenarios that Aviva’s strategists had run simulations on. Surely the various corporate cabals had run similar scenarios and had seen how dismal the outcomes were? The only real possibility was depressingly unthinkable, that these people were not rational actors and some form of psychopathology had set in. If this was true then the very worst scenarios would now play out and humanity would fight over an ever diminishing pile of shit, thus diminishing the pile even further, leaving one psychopath in triumphant ownership of precisely nothing: Lord High Muck of the kingdom of Crap, imperator sterculus.
He returned to bed to seek the comfort of Tshering’s arms as the first rays hit the golden statue of the Green Tara sitting on their bedroom puja. He cried. It was a cruel joke. There was no compassion in this world. His daughter Pema heard the commotion and toddled in on her two-year old legs, awkwardly clambering in to comfort her father.
“It’ll be awright papa,” she said cuddling into him.
And this deepened his resolve. More than anything he wanted Pema to grow up far, far away from a suicidal Earth.
Back in California Aviva ordered Shunyata’s own militia to full alert and dispatched defensive teams to Shunyata’s key facilities with orders to defend at all costs. A week later a bomb went off in Iran killing the computer specialist Dr Imran Sureshi, who had been cooperating with the Iranian secret service. In San Francisco a gunman entered the apartment of the exobiologist Dr Summer Whyte who had begun leaking information to several bloggers in the naïve belief that the news of interstellar travel should be shared with the whole of humanity. The intent was to scare her. It worked. She moved to Seattle and went silent.
The covert war had intensified.
18
Nuku
The morning was filled with chores; washing the children and helping in the kitchen. She had time to talk with her mothers and a not too subtle pressure was put on her to conceive.
Aloha had said she wanted to accompany her into the centre as she had some samples of their mother’s latest design to show some shopkeepers; a beautiful brocade featuring gold and silver and a new, silky material developed from a reed discovered in the north.
Nuku dressed in one of her mother’s designs, a blue floral chiffon piece that she tied, Polynesian style, at the waist. She borrowed some gold anklets and decided on a simple necklace of iridescent shell, a flower in her hair the final touch. Aloha had decided to stay naked because she was in that sort of mood, although Nuku suspected she just wanted to show off the new temporary body tattoos they had applied the night before.
They decided on the ferry rather than the underground monorail, even if it took longer. The walk to the sea took them through forest and houses carefully hidden amongst the trees. As this area was one of the older suburbs the architectural style was more Earth-like, with straight lines and rectangular shapes, although, even back then, architects had been concerned about blending into the environment by using natural stone and timber. Modern architecture now used organic forms with very few straight lines. In some of the newer suburbs it could be difficult to distinguish the habitats from natural features.
It was a leisurely stroll. They stopped a couple of times to talk to people they knew, until the path descended to one of the many bays of the archipelago. This one had a naturally deep bottom and was used to harbour boats of all descriptions, some anchored off shore and others tethered to a network of jetties.
The ferry was waiting patiently for all who had alerted it via their guardians: mostly pregnant women and children. They boarded and the horn tooted to alert a group of tardy children splashing in the water, who ran onto the jetty, dripping wet, their feet covered in sand.
It was one of the small ferries that plied the inlets of the archipelago, taking its time, powered by solar panels on its roof. Larger hydrofoils were faster and took the longer journeys between islands and up the coast. There was a light wind so a few small yachts had their sails up and she could see fishing boats in the distance. She sat back and enjoyed the view of the red sand stone cliff as they slipped by. They pulled into a jetty extending out from a small headland and some of the children clambered off, possibly on their way to some lesson or other.
Finally they came around Poseidon’s Point with its white lighthouse warning of submerged rocks. A couple of children out rock fishing waved as they slid by. Then Settler’s Bay came into full view with the majestic gold dome of Common sitting on top of Tshering Point.
They stopped at another jetty and more people got on, including three exotic bird-eyes from the north, a boy and two girls, all tall and athletic, all speaking in their particular accent, their large golden eyes glistening, their pin point irises almost closed in the direct sunlight.
Finally they docked at the central jetty in Drukpa Bay, directly under the towering cliffs of Tshering Point. Ferries were coming and going and a large hydrofoil was churning the water as it backed out to begin its journey. They spilled out on to a large plaza surrounded by restaurants and bars. This was one of the major entertainment areas and at night it was filled with people. But even now it was busy, mostly with Common staff and Congress members beginning their lunch.
This was where Aloha left her, taking a right turn towards some of the shops in an arcade behind the restaurants. She watched as her sister walked away, her tattooed brown skin glistening in the sun and a satchel of samples slung over her shoulder.
She walked ahead, up the wide, long, marble steps that led to the Common. Half way up she stopped to once again admire one of the planet’s masterpieces. The neoclassical marble sculpture of the god Eros designed by Han Tsung (after the great Earth sculptor Antonio Canova). Tsung had been able to reject the conservative conventions of old Earth and had depicted Eros in all his beauty and potency, his wings spread wide in a joyo
us celebration of life. And although the citizens of Eden had long ago given up on superstition she smiled as she watched two naked, pre-pubescent girls enact the custom of taking turns to stand on each other’s shoulders to stretch up and touch his erection in order to ensure their future fertility, as she had done when she was younger (almost falling, to hysterical laughter from her friends).
She entered the Common through the eastern entrance, which housed another of Han Tsung’s masterpieces, the goddess Hera, her legs spread, her vulva stretched, giving birth to a cascade of children, each sculpted in exquisite detail, and each celebrating the abundance of life.
“If you can make your way to the right and up the outer stairs,” announced her guardian flashing its light in the direction she was to go. She crossed the large marble hall with its inlayed floor, passing people of all sorts and sizes, including an old couple, bent and wizened, the old woman’s breasts sagging and the old man’s back bent, dressed formally in the maroon sarong of the Elders and dripping with gold. She knew who they were, Celestina Carabajal and her older husband George (who had outlasted her two younger husbands). As she recalled Madame Carabajal was at least a hundred and thirty and one of the last of the revolutionary second generation of the native born. She stopped and bowed with respect before she crossed their path and they nodded in polite recognition. It might be a young planet but the old were still revered.
“Papatuanuku Teixeira?” said a pregnant woman. “I’m justice Goya, but you can call me Maeve. Can I call you Nuku?”
“Yes ma’am” she replied as she bowed to acknowledge the woman’s authority.
“Would you like some tea and sweet cakes. The éclair is especially moreish. I understand you have some tales to tell about your adventures in the wilds of the Tiangkok peninsula…”
She was shaking when she walked out of the meeting with the justice. Of course she had accepted the confidentiality agreements but was shocked with the suggestion she might be required to kill. There was only one scenario in which she thought it might be justified. She was being asked to go off world, perhaps as part of a first landing on an alien world where they might encounter a dangerous species. The only flaw in her argument was that there had been no announcement of the discovery of an inhabitable world. There hadn’t been such an announcement since the Academy had finally restored the capacity to search the skies, just twenty years ago. There had been announcements about uninhabitable planets: over thirty lifeless planets and three that had life but were clearly toxic to humans. Surely the discovery of an inhabitable planet would be major news? Very odd.
She made her way down the stairs, beginning to feel hungry. A large shadow moved across the ground and she looked up to see a large ceramic-hull hover passing overhead heading toward the Common landing pad, possibly bringing Congress members from some of the further provinces. Before she turned she caught a glimpse of another in the distance, just as about a dozen smaller courier drones left the Congress building and headed in different directions.
“Are there any extraordinary meetings today?” she asked her guardian. “I thought Congress was in recess.”
“I am authorised to inform you under your subsection three, section eleven confidentiality agreement that an emergency meeting of the Elder’s Council has been called. You have not yet been cleared to know the agenda. Please do not speculate. You will be informed in due course.”
If she were shaking before, she was trembling now. Something serious was happening.
She tried to distract herself by ordering her favourite meal at a popular restaurant, a spicy seafood noodle washed down by a cold herbal beer. It was crowded with people having a late lunch, mainly workers from the Common, a few engrossed in their screens. She had to share a table with two young women deep in conversation, one pregnant and the other breastfeeding her newborn whilst trying to slurp up noodles. There were a lot of young mothers around these days. It seemed the young couldn’t wait; some had entered precocious puberty and were just nine or ten.
The prevailing theory was that because the planet had entered a sustained period of abundance with low population pressure, the instinctive recesses of the brain said it was an ideal time to breed. There had been anthropological evidence from old Earth that during such times in the past girls became pregnant as soon as they were able, with deep-seated genetic coding acting to lower the age of fertility. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that women started to wait, first until their late teens, until finally, in the twenty-first century, women waited until their late twenties and even thirties, with many choosing not to bear children at all. The result was that the population of the industrial countries declined. There was a good argument that this was due to better education and a higher intelligence, except Eden had disproved that theory: this population explosion was being driven by highly intelligent, educated women - and they were a long way from reaching the population maximum. In the last days old Earth had strained under the weight of nine billion people. The population of Eden was currently around three and a half million with a larger habitable land mass. By the time it would reach the maximum it was expected they would have found a number of class-A habitable planets.
She smiled at the mother as her baby detached from her breast. The mother smiled back, using a small cloth to wipe some of the dripping milk from her swollen nipple.
A young boy clearly doing his first section two eventually served her; she had waited on tables when she was his age. She had enjoyed it, learning valuable social skills and picking up a number of vital cooking tips. Her next job had been at a drone factory. The one after that was as a builder’s labourer helping to build homes. It was manual labour, something a drone could have done, except the Elders had always extolled the virtue of maintaining key manual skills. There were no menial workers on Eden, no service class. It was part of the ethos captured in the saying: just as you have to wipe your own arse, you have to clean up your own shit. So everyone took a turn serving others or cleaning the toilets, even the Elders.
19
Akash
In early January of the next year a young woman from Rio de Janeiro, Eva Teixeira, one of the few women trained by the Brazilian air force, climbed into the first manned probe to leave Earth’s atmosphere. Having no mass it had no trouble leaving Earth’s gravitational pull. She took it out to a safe altitude, looked back at the familiar blue orb of the Earth and jumped. In an instant she was looking at the rings of Saturn. This part of the test successful she calmly jumped into orbit around Gliese 581c, an orange gas giant, then jumped back to Earth orbit and descended without the normal heat of re-entry.
As she landed the probe, a security patrol two kilometres away encountered an unidentified group packing away monitoring equipment. They did not hesitate and opened fire, killing them all. A search of the cars revealed they were a geological survey team from the Pan Brazilian Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Oil, one of the leading corporations behind the US coup. The patrol alerted Aviva immediately and a scan of all recent satellite calls from Brazil revealed a communication to Universal Oil’s HQ in Dallas. Within twenty-four hours the remote Brazilian test facility was closed. A specialist team rigged an ‘accidental’ fire. There was nothing left.
In Bhutan the exoplanet team was sorting through the data from a hundred and fifty jumps. There was nothing habitable. Sixty per cent of the planets were dead and the rest were too cold or too hot, with various combinations of toxic atmospheres.
Despair began to set in. The world was in turmoil and many of the staff felt a strong pull to be home with family.
With the next jump they found two planets with water and with life, both blue orbs dotted with clouds, both with the right balance of oxygen. The first planet was warm and covered in dense forest somewhat like Earth’s Triassic period. As soon as the probe landed it detected a swarm of life. Data streamed in but as it did, the mood became more pensive. The probe was showing a vid of a vicious looking armoured arthropod
the size of a large bull. The exobiologists watched as sharp beaked creatures dropped from the sky, piercing the hull of the beast with needle sharp beaks. After some discussion they agreed that the beaks of the creatures must have included some metal or reinforced carbon in order to pierce such thick armour. It was calculated that such a beak would pierce a military helmet and that current technology could not afford any protection to vulnerable humans. As they sent the probe to other parts of the globe they found life in a vicious battle of survival. It was quickly realised that human colonisation would be impractical and the planet was declared hostile.
The second planet offered much more hope. The probe landed on a broad grassy tundra filled with multiple species of exotic grazing animals numbering in the thousands, not unlike the Serengeti or the Prairies of North America before European colonisation. The initial survey suggested two phyla of creature: a six-legged form and a two-legged form that seemed to be a cross between an ostrich and bear. As more data came in they became even more excited. The planet was somewhat larger than Earth with a gravity of one point thirty-two, a five hundred and sixty-two day year and an average thirty-hour day. The atmosphere was rich in oxygen and the climate was well within the comfortable zone despite large areas of ice in the polar regions, perhaps the result of a receding ice age. There were three large continental landmasses and large areas of open ocean. The more they looked at it; the more it became a prime candidate.
20
Prax and Cynthia
Aris woke her early. She stretched and yawned, adjusting her eyes to the first light of sunrise.
“Want a swim?”
“Huh?”
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