He sighed and looked up at the arc again. We’ll get here eventually.
Of that we are sure. After all, you have already made a start.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,joshua said.So I guess that means you’re not all bad after all.
Jay appeared on the chalet veranda carrying a bulging shoulder bag. She shouted and waved, then charged down the steps.
“Is her mother all right?” Tracy asked urgently.
“She’s treatable,” Joshua said. “That’s all I can say. I’ve stopped intervening now. It’s just too damn tempting. Not that the singularity would permit much more.”
“It doesn’t need any more. Corpus analysed what you’ve done. You made some smart moves. The current economic structure won’t survive.”
“I provided the opportunity for change, plus one small active measure. What happens after . . . well, let’s just say, I have faith.”
Jed and Beth stayed with Marie in the hospital waiting room. Beth wasn’t exactly overjoyed about that, she would have loved to see Tranquillity’s park. But Gari, Navar, and Webster were settled in the paediatric wing which wasn’t far away. She didn’t know what was going to happen to any of them next, but then right now that applied to a lot of the human race. There were worse places to be cast ashore.
The doctor who’d met the bus came out of the emergency treatment centre. “Marie?”
“Yes?” She looked up at him, bright with hope.
“I’m terribly sorry, there was nothing we could do.”
Marie’s mouth parted silently, she covered her face with her hands and started sobbing.
“What happened to him?” Beth said.
“There was some kind of nanonic filament web in his brain,” the doctor said. “Its molecular structure had broken down. Disintegration caused a massive amount of damage. In fact, I really don’t understand how he could have survived at all. You said he’s been with you for weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Ah well, we’ll do a postmortem, of course. But I doubt we’ll learn much. I think it’s a symptom of the times.”
“Thanks.”
The doctor smiled briskly. “The counselor will be along in a moment. Marie will have the best help possible to overcome this. Don’t you worry.”
“Great.” She saw the way Jed was looking at Marie, as though he wanted to be crying with her, or for her, sparing her the burden.
“Jed, we’re done here,” Beth said.
“What do you mean?” he asked in puzzlement.
“It’s over. Are you coming?”
He looked from her to Marie. “But we can’t leave her.”
“Why, Jed? What is she to us?”
“She was Kiera, she was everything we dreamed of, Beth, a new start, somewhere decent.”
“This is Marie Skibbow, and she’ll hate Kiera for the rest of her life.”
“We can’t give up now. The three of us can start Dead-night again, for real this time. There were thousands of people just like us who wanted what she promised. They’ll come again.”
“Right.” Beth turned and marched out of the waiting room, paying no heed to his braying calls behind her. She hurried for the lift, her heart lifting at the prospect of finally seeing the lush parkland with its sparkling circumfluous sea.
I’m young, I’m free, I’m in Tranquillity, and I’m definitely not going back to bloody Koblat.
It was a great beginning.
The Assembly Chamber was deathly silent as the vote was taken. The ambassadors on the floor were first to register.
From his seat at the Polity Council table, Samual Aleksandrovich watched the tally rise. There were several abstentions, of course, and the names were no surprise to him: Kulu, Oshanko, New Washington, Mazaliv, several of their close allies. No more than twenty, though, which made the First Admiral smile contentedly. In diplomatic terms that was as good as a censure motion in itself, a sharp warning to the larger powers.
The ambassadors of the Polity Council entered their vote. Samual Aleksandrovich was last, pressing the button in front of him, and seeing the last digit click over on the big board. Ridiculous anachronism, he thought, though certainly dramatic enough.
The Assembly speaker got to his feet and gave the President a nervous little bow. Olton Haaker stared straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s gaze.
“The motion that this house has no confidence in the President is carried by seven hundred and ninety-eight votes, with none against.”
Durringham had never recovered from the devastation wrought by Chas Paske. It was the docks and warehouse sector which had born the brunt of the water’s impact. Not that they’d stopped the onrush. Debris from their disintegrating frames had formed a black speckle crest on the wave as it surged on into the town’s main commercial district. The wooden buildings with their minimal foundations had crumpled instantly. Three dumpers had been knocked over and pushed along.
A kilometre inland, the resistance offered by energistically reinforced walls managed to protect the buildings, though the mud on which they lay was siphoned away, dragging them back towards the Juliffe as the waters retreated. When they’d drained away, Durringham was left with a broad semicircle of destruction eating right into the heart of the town, a swamp with a million filthy splinters sticking upwards. Bodies lay among them, caked in drying mud and slowly decomposing in the dreadful humidity. Despite this, Durringham continued to function as an urban centre all the time Lalonde was hidden away in a realm outside the universe. Like Norfolk’s, its essentially low tech nature allowed its inhabitants to carry on along virtually the same lines as before. Boats continued to sail up and down the Juliffe, crops were sown and harvested, timber cut and sawn.
Now it was back in the universe. The humidity and daily rains returned with a vengeance. And with the thick carpet of weeds chopped away from the metal grid runway, spaceplanes were arriving once again. They were complemented by Kiint craft, small blunt ovoids that flew up and down the Juliffe and its myriad tributaries collecting people from the villages and delivering them to Durringham. Over two thousand of them were performing ambulance duties, racing round at hypersonic velocity, scanning the jungle for any remaining humans.
The Kiint had set up seven fat thirty-storey towers on the edge of the city. They’d been extruded in one go from a provider, coming fully fitted with all the medical equipment necessary to treat dangerously ill humans.
Ruth Hilton had been picked up on the third day after the Return, as people were calling it. When the flyer landed in front of her, its controlling AI asking her to come inside, she seriously contemplated not bothering. The memories of possession acted like damping rods on her psyche. She certainly hadn’t eaten anything since the Return.
In the end it was her hope for Jay which made her climb in. For the last few weeks, her possessor had been soaking up aspects of her personality. She’d travelled between villages, asking for news of Jay and any of the other Aberdale children who might have survived that fateful night. Nobody had heard much from that district after the bomb went off somewhere on the savannah.
For two days she’d lain in the hospital while the Kiint examined her and made her eat. The big xenocs had smeared a bluish jelly on the areas of her skin around her cancers, which sank into her flesh as if she’d suddenly become porous. They told her it would flush her tumour cells away, a less invasive technique than human medical packages. For one and a half days she peed a very strange fluid.
By the end of the second day she was fit enough to walk around the ward. Like a lot of her fellow patients, she sat in front of the big picture window overlooking Durringham, saying very little. Civil engineering crews were arriving hourly, fat bright-yellow jeeps crawling down the muddy streets. Programmable silicon buildings were mushrooming in the ruined semicircle of mud. Power cables had been strung up; once again electric lights began to shine in several districts during the night.
As far as she was concerned it was wasted effo
rt. There were too many memories, too many dead children out in the jungle. This could never be her home again, not any more. She kept asking the Kiint and the hospital AI if anyone had found Jay. Always the same answer.
Then on the sixth day, Horst and Jay walked into the ward, happy and healthy. She clutched Jay to her, not letting her daughter say anything for a long time while she reaffirmed her will to live by the contact.
Horst pulled a couple of chairs over, and the three of them stared down at the city with its industrious invaders.
“This is going to be a very busy place for the next century,” Horst said, his voice a mixture of surprise and admiration. “Do you remember our first night? The old transient dormitory’s gone now, but I think that’s the harbour where it was.” He pointed vaguely. The circular basins of polyp had survived.
“Will they rebuild them?” Jay asked. She thought all the activity was tremendously exciting.
“I doubt it,” Horst said. “The people who’ll be emigrating here from now on will be wanting five-star hotels.”
Ruth raised her gaze to look across the sky. The morning rainclouds had just departed eastwards, heading inland to soak the villages upriver. They’d left a patch of pristine sky above the town and its boundary of gently steaming jungle. Five brilliant stars shone through the glaring azure atmosphere, the closest one showing a definite crescent. She thought one of them might be Earth itself.
There were forty-seven terracompatible planets sharing its orbit now. All of them stage-one colony worlds, ready to absorb the population from the arcologies.
“Are we going back to Aberdale?” Jay asked.
“No, darling.” Ruth stroked her daughter’s sun-bleached hair. “I’m afraid we lost this world. People from Earth will come here and make it very different to what it was. They don’t have the kind of past to overcome here which we do. It belongs to them now. We need to move on again.”
The bus rolled smoothly across the docking ledge, and linked its airlock with the reception lounge. Athene was waiting for the pair of them, standing proud in a silky blue ceremonial ship-tunic, the star of captaincy absent from her collar.
I came back,sinon said. I told you I would.
I never doubted you. But I would have understood if you’d gone on with the crystal entity. It was a fabulous opportunity.
Others took that opportunity. It doesn’t cease to exist because I refuse it.
Stubborn to the very end.
One day humans, or what we become, may make a similar journey by themselves. I would like to think I played my part in the culture which will set us upon such a road.
You are different to the Sinon who left.
I have a soul of my own now. I will not return to the multiplicity; I mean to live out my life in this form.
I’m glad you have found yourself again. I need someone around the house who can keep my appalling grandchildren in line.
He laughed, a harsh brazen clacking. Every day, all I wished for was to return. I was afraid you didn’t want me to.
I would never think that thought. Not of you, no matter what you’d done.
I have brought someone with me who suffers far more than either of us.
So I see.she moved forward and gave a slight bow. “Welcome to Romulus, General Hiltch.”
It was the moment Ralph had dreaded most of all, passing over the threshold. If there was no forgiveness here he would never find any within this universe. He couldn’t even bring himself to smile at the stately old woman whose face contained so much genuine concern. “I have no army to command any more, Athene. I resigned my commission.”
“Tell me why you have come, Ralph.”
“I came out of guilt. I ordered so many Edenists to their death. The Liberation ruined what it was supposed to save. It existed for vanity and pride, not honour. And it was all my idea. I need to say I’m sorry.”
“We’d like to hear you, Ralph. Take as long as you want.”
“Will you accept me as one of you?”
She gave him a compassionate smile. “You wish to become an Edenist?”
“Yes, though it’s a selfish wish. I was told an Edenist can relieve his burden by sharing it with every other Edenist. My guilt has turned to pure grief.”
“That’s not selfish, Ralph. You’re offering to share yourself, to contribute.”
“Will it end? Will I be able to live with what I’ve done?”
“I’ve brought up a great many Edenist children in my house, Ralph.” She put her arm in his, and started walking him towards the exit. “And I’ve never had a serpent yet.”
It took several weeks for all the mundane functions of government to return to normal after the Confederation was transferred out of the galaxy. People realized that their circumstances would change, in many ways quite profoundly. Religions strove to incorporate or explain away the singularity’s gospel of the universe. Joshua didn’t mind that: as he told Louise, conviction in one’s God nearly always equated to a conviction in self. Time might well see an end to the undue influence religion had on the way people approached life. Then again, knowing the perversity of humans, maybe not.
Starflight was also altering. Travel between stars never more than half a light-year apart was incredibly quick, and cheap.
Every reporter who interviewed Joshua asked why he hadn’t taken the Confederation stars back again. Quite infuriatingly, he just smiled and said he liked the view from out here.
Governments weren’t so fond of it. There could never be any outward expansion again, unless new propulsion methods were developed. Funds for wormhole research were quietly increased.
There would be no more antimatter to terrorise planetary populations. The stars where the production stations orbited were all left behind in the galaxy (though Joshua had teleported their crews out). Politicians turned their eyes to the defence budget, seeing how funds could be shifted towards more voter-friendly spending sprees.
The Kiint provider technology was regarded with fascination by the general public as it worked its miracles on the Returned worlds. Everybody wanted one of those for Christmas.
Earth’s population was almost schizophrenic over the new stage-one planets available. On the one hand, their own climate had been reset to normal, making the arcology domes redundant. But Earth’s surface would take a generation to restore. And if it was restored with forests, meadows, jungles, and prairies, there would be a diaspora from the arcologies which would ruin everything. However, if the population was spread around the new planets (less than a billion each), all of them would have a natural environment, allowing them to keep their present level of consumerist industrialisation and not totally screw up the atmospheres with waste heat. Assuming that many people could be moved economically—say if you used those nifty little Kiint craft, or something came out of all that new superdrive research.
Small, subtle changes were manifesting in all aspects of Confederation life. They would merge and build on each other. And eventually, Joshua hoped, transformation would become irresistible.
But in the meantime, the methods of governance remained the same. Income had to be earned. Taxes still had to be paid. And laws had to be enforced. Backlogs of court cases worked through.
Traslov was one world where changes would be a long time coming. A terracompatible planet in the last stages of an ice age, it was one of five Confederation penal colonies. Joshua had included them, too. Much to the relief of various governments, Avon included. Traslov was where the criminals which the Confederation Navy brought in were sent.
Prison ship flights resumed after three weeks.
André Duchamp was led into the drop capsule by one of the guards, who fastened him in one of the eight acceleration couches. Once the straps were in place, holding André’s arms and legs against the thin padding, his restraint collar was taken off.
“Behave yourself,” the guard said curtly, and air swam out through the hatch to fetch the next prisoner.
With suprem
e self control, André sat quiet. His flesh was still slightly tender where the medical nanonics had been removed. And he was sure those bastard anglo quack doctors hadn’t fully cured his intestinal tract; he kept getting raging indigestion after meals. If you could call what he’d been fed meals. But his indigestion was nothing to the suffering inflicted by the awesome injustice brought down upon his poor head. The Navy blamed him for the antimatter attack against Trafalgar. Him! An innocent, persecuted blackmail victim. It was diabolical.
“Hello there.”
André glared at the badly overweight, balding, middle-aged man in the couch next to him.
“Guess we ought to introduce ourselves, seeing as how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m Mixi Penrice, and this is my wife, Imelda.”
André’s face cracked in mortification as a timid woman, also fat and middle aged, waved at him hopefully from the couch beside her husband.
“So pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Guard!” André yelled frantically. “Guard.”
There was never any contact between the Confederation at large and Traslov, in that every flight was strictly one way: down. The theory was simple enough. Prisoners, voluntarily accompanied by their family, were shot down into the equatorial band of continent not covered by glaciers. Sociologists, hired by participating governments to reassure civil rights organizations, claimed that if enough people were brought together then they’d inevitably form a stable community. After a hundred years, or a million people, whichever came first, the flights would be stopped. The communities would expand in the wake of the retreating glaciers. And in another hundred years a self-sustaining agrarian civilization would emerge with a modest industrial capacity, at which point they’d be allowed to join the Confederation and develop like a normal colony. As yet, no one had found out if an ex-penal colony would want to join a society which had exiled every one of their ancestors.
André’s drop capsule fired down through the atmosphere, hitting seven gees at the top of its deceleration peak. It plummeted through the low cloud layer and deployed its parachute five hundred metres from the ground. Two metres from the ground, retrorockets fired in a half-second burst, killing the capsule’s final velocity as the chute jettisoned.
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