Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘We work towards goals that subsume your own. Can you not trust us as you would trust a parent, trust that we will act in your own best interests even if you do not understand those actions?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Boyle said. ‘Even if you didn’t fight amongst yourselves, we still wouldn’t trust you.’

  Philmus was faintly shocked to hear a priest swear. ‘What’s meant by “Amasia”?’

  Earthshine did not reply.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it means,’ Boyle said sharply. ‘A long-term land-grab. Very long-term. Right now these three super-entities each have their own territories. But the continents are going to converge into a new supercontinent, a new Pangaea. It will start soon – soon in your terms, Earthshine. Only ninety million years or so before North America crashes into Asia, right? They plan to fight a war over Amasia, a territory that won’t even exist for a quarter of a billion years.’

  Philmus was astonished. ‘They really think that far ahead?’

  ‘They are immortals. The Catholic Church thinks on the scale of centuries. Compared to these monsters, we are mayflies.’

  Earthshine neither confirmed nor denied all this. ‘This meeting serves no purpose. It was granted only because of you, Officer Philmus. More than one of us Core AIs has subcomponents that relied on your intervention, at some point.’ He tapped his computer, and a simple menu appeared. ‘You don’t need to make the journey back. I can send you directly to the bunker at York, or wherever you wish.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Boyle, and he approached the desk. ‘I’ve made my case. I came here to ask you to engage more fully with the priorities of mankind: I mean the short-term, the tactical. Priorities that might save millions of lives, now, or in the near future. Tell me you’ll at least consider it.’

  ‘If that will reassure you.’

  ‘There’s something else. I am a priest. I don’t know when, or if, an encounter like this, between us and you, will occur again. We, my Church, want to mark it with an appropriate symbol of our own.’ From a pocket he produced a small silver vessel; he opened it to reveal ashes. ‘Palm leaves, burnt on Ash Wednesday. Let me bless you, Earthshine. For, whatever you are, whatever you become, it’s clear that the destiny of our mortal bodies is in your hands.’

  Stiffly, Earthshine nodded.

  Boyle dipped his thumb in the ash, leaned forward, and made a cross on Earthshine’s wrinkled forehead, a smooth smudge on the skin.

  Which glowed red, then white, and flared like magnesium in water. Earthshine screamed. His head began to peel back like subliming wax, revealing nothing within.

  Boyle stood over his victim, tall, righteous, strong. ‘The robust links to your cousin-rivals should transmit that nasty little bug without difficulty. So we mere humans have managed to strike back at you, here at the heart of your infinite maze!’

  Philmus glared at Boyle. ‘So that’s it. You used me as a Trojan horse, to deliver this!’

  Earthshine flickered, breaking up momentarily into a cloud of pixels, before returning to a semblance of his former self. The stabilisation must have taken a huge effort. But he was sketchily drawn now, his representation crude and blotchy. ‘You fool,’ he said levelly.

  ‘From now on you’ll serve mankind, not the other way around.’

  ‘But we always did …’

  Beyond the small, dusty windows there was a shifting light. Philmus turned, and saw that the drifting towers of Earthshine’s Ultimate L were disintegrating one by one, popping apart in clouds of dust and rubble. The fragments fell to the sea below, where malware monsters consumed them, or rather the processing power that had supported them. And all across the tremendous cavern the light flickered, like a failing fluorescent.

  Still Boyle loomed over Earthshine. As Philmus watched, Earthshine seemed to crumble, as if that tall, well-built figure was rotting from within, the face imploding, the clothes turning to tatters of bark and leaf, the body becoming hollow. And a face like a scarecrow caricature, pulled back in a ghastly grin, emerged from the wreckage.

  Philmus stared. ‘Freudenthal. The figure on the beach.’

  ‘I took the virus for Earthshine …’

  ‘He was never here, was he?’

  ‘No …’

  The study, the building around them, the cavern, all of it folded away like a cheap stage set, revealing an underlying darkness. Philmus could still see Boyle and Freudenthal, lit by an unreal light. But there was no structure beyond the three of them, their relative positions. She felt as small as an electron, as huge as a galaxy.

  ‘But he’s coming,’ whispered Freudenthal. ‘You are no more than bad dreams to him. Yet his revenge will be – remarkable.’

  Boyle grabbed Philmus’s hand.

  And Philmus saw light, a new light, just a point, and yet it filled space and time. It unfolded like a flower blooming, and particles and lines billowed out and rushed past her face in an insubstantial breeze. Some of the lines tangled, but still the unfolding continued, in a fourth, fifth, sixth direction, in ways she could somehow, if briefly, conceive.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ Freudenthal yelled. ‘Did you get what you came here for?’

  Boyle was praying in a rapid mutter.

  Philmus was not afraid. She waited, calm, for what was to come.

  OBELISK

  Wei Binglin first saw the cairn of Cao Xi, as it happened, during his earliest moments on Mars.

  It came at the end of a long and difficult voyage. Through the last few days of the Sunflower’s approach to Mars, Wei Binglin had been content for the automated systems to bring his ship home. Why not? Since the accident, most of the Sunflower’s manual controls had been inactive anyhow. And besides, Wei no longer regarded himself as deserving the rank of captain at all; in a ship that had become a drifting field hospital, he was reduced to the role of caretaker, his only remaining duty to bring those who had survived this, his last flight, into a proper harbour.

  So, for the first time in his many approaches to the planet, he passively allowed Mars to swim out of the darkness before him. In the light of the distant sun, it struck him from afar as a malformed, lopsided, murky world, oddly unfinished, like a piece of pottery made by an inadequate student. And yet as the ship entered its parking orbit high above the planet and skimmed around the night side, he saw the colourful layers of a thin but deep atmosphere, a scattering of white in the craters – clouds, fog? – and brilliant pinpricks of light in the night. Human settlements, mostly Chinese, a few UN outposts. A world where people were already being born, living, dying. A world where he too, he decided, had come to die.

  The surviving crew and passengers of the Sunflower had to wait a day in orbit while a small flotilla of vessels came out to meet them from Mars’s outer moon Deimos, a resource-rich rock itself that served as a centre for orbital operations. Many of the craft brought paramedics and automated medical equipment; some of the injured passengers and crew would be taken to the low-gravity hospital on Deimos for treatment before facing the rigours of a descent from orbit.

  There were only a handful of bodies to process. Most of the relatives of the dead had been content for the remains of their loved ones to be ejected into interplanetary space. Wei had officiated over these services himself, supported by the faithful of relevant creeds and cultures.

  He might no longer have regarded himself as a captain, but the crew of the Deimos station now paid him a certain honour. When the last passengers and crew had been lifted off, they sent out a final shuttle just for him, so he could be the last of the crew to leave his ship. But of course the Sunflower was not left empty; it already swarmed with repair crews, human and robotic, as it was towed gently by tugs to an orbital rendezvous with Deimos. An interplanetary ship was too valuable to scuttle, even one so grievously injured.

  The shuttle that came for him was a small, fat-bodied glider coated with scorched-looking he
atshield tiles. In orbit, driven by powerful attitude thrusters, it was a nimble, nippy craft. Once Wei was aboard, the pilot, a young woman, allowed him to sit beside her in the co-pilot’s seat as she took a quick final tour around the drifting hulk of the Sunflower.

  He pointed out a great gash in the hull. ‘There. That is the wound that killed her.’

  ‘I see. The fusion containment failed, I read from the report.’

  ‘We lost our ion drive immediately, and many of the tethers to the lightsail were severed …’

  Ships like the Sunflower, dedicated to long-haul interplanetary spaceflight, were roomy, lightweight hulls driven by the gentle but persistent thrust of ion-drive engines, and by the push of sunlight on their huge sails. A journey from Earth to Mars on such a ship still took months, but months less than an unpowered trajectory, a Hohmann ellipse. This was characteristic, and proven, Chinese technology.

  The pilot was watching his face. ‘The incident was a news headline on Earth and Mars, and elsewhere. There were heroic efforts to stabilise the environment systems and save the passengers—’

  ‘That was the achievement of my crew, not of myself.’

  ‘While you, Captain, manipulated your surviving propulsion system, a lightsail like a bird’s broken wing, to put the ship on the Hohmann orbit that eventually brought you to Mars. It was an achievement of courage and improvisation to compare with the rescue of Apollo 13, some commentators have remarked.’

  He glanced at her. It was unusual in his experience for such a young person to have knowledge of pioneering space exploits over a hundred and forty years gone; to many of them it was as if the age of space had begun in 2003, when Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to reach Earth orbit aboard the Shenzhou 5.

  But he didn’t feel like being congratulated. ‘I lost my ship and many of my passengers. And such a slow crawl to sanctuary, on a ship full of the injured, was agonising.’ He had made daily visits from the bridge to the huddled remains of the passenger compartments. There were broken families back there, families who had lost a father or a mother or children, and now were forced to endure more months of confinement, deprivation and suffering, unable even to escape from the scene of their loss. There were even orphans. He remembered one little girl in particular, no more than five years old; her name was Xue Ling, he had learned, and her father, mother and brother were all gone, an optimistic pioneer family wiped out in an instant. She had looked lost, bewildered, even as she rested her head against the stiff fabric of a kindly officer’s tunic.

  ‘I am sure it was terrible,’ said the pilot. ‘But you did bring your ship home. You should remember that.’ She tapped her control panels and the shuttle turned its nose to the planet. Soon the craft bit into the air. The atmosphere of Mars was thin and high; the ride was surprisingly gentle compared to a re-entry at Earth, and the shuttle, shedding its orbital energy in frictional heat, made big swooping turns over a ruddy landscape. ‘We will be down shortly, Captain.’

  ‘I am no longer a captain. I have resigned, formally. Please do not use that honorific.’

  ‘So I understand. You have decided to give up your career.’

  ‘People trusted me to bring them here safely; I failed. The least I can do is honour their memory by—’

  She grunted. ‘By doing what? Becoming a lichen farmer? I suppose to become a living monument is a noble impulse. But somewhat self-destructive, and a waste of your expertise, if you want my opinion, sir.’

  He didn’t want it particularly, but he bit back a reprimand. He no longer held rank over this woman.

  ‘You have no family on Earth, sir?’

  ‘No wife, no.’

  ‘Perhaps that will be your destiny on Mars. To help raise one of the first generations of pioneers, who will—’

  ‘That will not be possible. During the accident – the failure of the shielding around the fusion reactor, and then a loss of shielding fluids from the ship as a whole …’ He could see she understood. ‘I was baked for many months by the radiations of interplanetary space. The doctors tell me I have a high propensity for cancers in the future. And if I am not sterile, I should be.’

  ‘How old are you, sir?’

  ‘I am thirty-five years old.’

  She did not speak again.

  The shuttle came down at a small, young settlement in a terrain in the southern hemisphere called the Terra Cimmeria. This was a landscape peculiarly shaped by sprawling crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air, Wei thought, it looked crumpled. The settlement, called Fire City, nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor scarred by dry channels and smaller, younger craters. From the air he glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries. He believed the drills sought water from aquifers.

  The shuttle swept down smoothly onto a long runway blasted across the crater floor. When it had come to rest, the pilot briskly helped Wei pull on a pressure suit. They clambered into an airlock, where they were briefly bathed in sterilising ultraviolet. Then the hatch popped, and they climbed down a short stair.

  Wei Binglin took a step on the surface of Mars, exploring the generously low gravity, considering the clear impressions his boots made in the ubiquitous, clinging, rust-coloured dust.

  He could not see the walls of Mendel from here, or anything of the geologically complicated landscape beyond. The crater floor itself was a plain littered with rocks, like a high desert, and a small sun hung in a sky of washed-out brown. A few domes nestled nearby. Wei had visited Mars four times before, but each time he had stayed in orbit with his interplanetary craft, or had visited the moon Deimos for work and recreation. He had never walked on Mars before. And now, he realised, he would never walk on any other world, ever again.

  That was when he spotted the cairn.

  It stood near the runway, a roughly pyramidal heap of rocks. He walked over. The cairn was taller than he was, and evidently purposefully constructed. ‘What is this?’

  The pilot followed him. ‘This is the landing site of Cao Xi.’ The first to reach Mars, who had survived no more than an hour on the surface after his one-man lander crashed. ‘His body has been returned to his family on Earth.’

  ‘I once saw the mausoleum.’

  ‘But still, this place, where he walked, is remembered. The runway was built here as an appropriate gesture, it was thought, a link between ground and sky, space and Mars. This is a young place still, and everything is rather rough and ready.’

  Wei looked around. He selected a rock about the size of his head; it was sharp-edged but easy to lift in the low gravity, if resistant to be moved through inertia. He hauled the rock up and settled it on the upper slope of the cairn.

  ‘Everybody does that on arrival,’ said the pilot.

  ‘Why was I brought here, to this particular settlement?’

  The pilot shrugged.

  But the answer was obvious. Knowing nothing of the colonising of Mars, he had asked his former superiors to nominate a suitable destination, a new home. They had been drawn by the symbolism of this place. But Cao Xi had been a hero; Wei was not.

  The cairn struck Wei as oddly steep-sloped. ‘You could not build such a structure on Earth.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘I wonder how tall you could make such a mound, here in this partial gravity?’

  ‘I do not know.’ She pointed at a rooster-tail of dust behind a gleaming speck, coming from one of the domes. ‘Your hosts arrive. A family, husband and wife, themselves former interplanetary crew. They have volunteered to be your guides as you find your feet, here on Mars.’

  Wei felt a peculiar reluctance to meet these people, these Martians. He did not belong here. Yet he felt no impulse
either to climb back on the shuttle and return to orbit. He belonged nowhere, he thought, as if he was dead himself. Yet he lived, breathed, was capable of curiosity, such as about this cairn. ‘Perhaps I will find purpose here.’

  ‘I am sure you will.’ The shuttle pilot touched his arm. He could feel the pressure through the suit layers, a kind gesture. ‘Perhaps you will be keeper of the cairn.’

  That made him laugh. ‘Perhaps so.’ It struck him that he did not even know her name. He turned to face the approaching rover.

  As Xue Ling got up to leave his office, Wei looked over his schedule on the slate built into his desk. He was checking his next appointment, not the time. This office was in a privileged position, built into the dome wall so he had an exterior view, and he could judge the time pretty well by the way the afternoon sun slid around the flanks of the cairn.

  He was dismayed to see that his next appointment was Bill Kendrick. Trouble for him again, with this American who had been more or less dumped on him from the UN colony at Eden.

  Kendrick was waiting when Xue Ling opened the door. He was tall, taller than most Chinese, wiry. His file said he was forty-seven years old, only a little older than Wei; he looked younger save for a shock of prematurely grey hair, which was probably as much an engineered affectation as his apple-smooth cheeks, the taut flesh at his neck.