Proxima (22 page)

King winked at Stef. ‘Believe me, they’ve tried.’

Stef snapped, ‘Can we get on to the reason you brought me here?’

King looked surprised, then laughed. ‘Down to business, eh? You always were impatient, I remember that of you as well. You even got restless during the countdown for the launch of that
first hulk, the
I-One
, didn’t you?’

‘Not restless. I was just a lot less interested in some big dumb piece of heavy engineering than I was in the kernels that powered it.’

‘Yes, the kernels. The objects you have devoted your life to studying, in the end.’

‘Strictly speaking, the physics behind them, yes. And that is what you brought me here to discuss, right? But look, Sir Michael. I’m no expert in international law. I do know that
kernel science is supposed to be kept from the Core AIs.’ She hesitated, looking at Earthshine. ‘No offence,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Great heavens, none taken.’

‘That’s true, of course,’ said King. ‘And you know why, don’t you? Because
we don’t trust you
, Earthshine. We have to deal with you. I have to meet
you, what – every other week? But we don’t like you, or trust you. Sitting in your lairs, your hardened bunkers in the bedrock, plugged into all the world’s essential systems. You
and your cousins on the other continents, Ifa and the Archangel.’

‘Oh, not cousins. Rivals, perhaps,’ Earthshine said mildly. ‘Companions, sometimes . . .’

Stef got the distinct impression that they had worked together for too long, that King chafed under the burden of a requirement to report to this strange old artificial entity. They were like
bickering academics in some crusty institution, she thought.

King said now, ‘Major, you do understand what we’re dealing with here? The big continental AIs, the Core AIs as they are called, were spawned in the first place in the pre-Heroic
days. They came out of a global network of transnational companies, a network which collectively controlled much of the world’s economy. Within that network nodes of deeper interconnection
and control emerged: “super-entities”, the economic analysts called them.
They
were still at the level of human culture. But beneath the corporate super-entities, intensive AI
capability necessarily clustered. Then came the demands for security for core processors and data backups, hardened refuges linked by robust comms networks. Well, they were given what they
wanted.’ He grinned, rueful. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Earthshine said, ‘The early members of the Core were essential to the great projects of the Heroic Generation. Supremely intelligent.’

‘But they were not human,’ King said sternly.

‘The kernels,’ Stef said, trying to wrench the conversation round to the point. ‘It must have taken a monumental effort to keep the science of the kernels away from the Core
AIs.’

King nodded grimly. ‘It did indeed. The fact that the kernels were found on Mercury, and are studied nowhere closer to Earth than the moon, all helped. That and the fact that the danger
was spotted immediately.’

‘What danger?’

‘That we would understand,’ Earthshine said, ‘where you do not.’

Stef asked coldly, ‘What don’t I understand?’

‘The true physics. Such as the unified theories known as quantum gravity, among other labels. They remain as tantalisingly out of reach to you as they ever were, have been for centuries.
You only know them by limits, low-energy approximations – like relativity, quantum physics. As if you are trying to understand the structure of a diamond by studying a single edge. To explore
reality further is beyond your engineering capabilities; to
compute
more is beyond your intellects. In fact, you’ve learned more by playing with kernels, which are
quantum-gravitational toys, than you have from all your theorising in the two hundred years since Einstein.’

Stef scowled. ‘You’re saying that quantum gravity might be
too hard
for a mere human like me ever to understand.’

‘But not for me,’ Earthshine said. ‘Perhaps, anyhow. Which is why those of small minds and smaller hearts, like Sir Michael here, have kept the kernels from us. What might we
achieve if we had such knowledge?’

King looked at Stef. ‘You’ve spent most of your adult life off-planet, Major. See what we have to deal with down here? Crap like this, day after day, decade after decade . .
.’

And Stef did see it, saw a fundamental dichotomy between the two branches of mankind as they were emerging in the new era. The spacegoing were outward-looking, expansive, physically exploring
the universe. While the Earthbound were stuck in this gravity well, dominated by legacies of the past, such as these dreadful old indestructible AIs cowering in their holes in the ground. Suddenly
she longed to be in space, back on the moon – anywhere but here on this old planet, this museum of horrors.

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘We want you to go to Mercury, Major Kalinski,’ King said. ‘Or rather, go
back
to Mercury. I will accompany you in person, to the kernel beds, as they have come to be
known.’

And there was the opportunity she had come here in hope of, all the way to Earth. But she was baffled. ‘Why? What do you want of me there?’

‘You’re going to have to see for yourself, Major. We’ve found something.’ He glanced at Earthshine. ‘Something so significant, of such long-term importance to
mankind, that I feel we’ve no choice but to bring it to the attention of these Core AIs. Because if the buggers are useful for anything, it’s thinking about the long term. And we need
someone like you, a kernel physicist. We don’t know what to make of it. We’re hoping you might be able to make informed guesses about it, at least.’

‘About
what
?’

‘Something strange,’ said Earthshine.

I
n the endless afternoon of Per Ardua, time flowed unevenly, like the flares that ran across the face of Proxima itself. Sometimes there seemed no
interval at all between waking and getting ready to sleep again. And sometimes the days-that-were-not-days dragged, and Yuri felt as if he was back in the solitary tanks in Eden.

Their Earth-based calendars became irrelevant. Increasingly they marked the passage of time by events, by stuff that changed their lives for better or worse. The weather had turned, for one
thing; four years after the landing, Proxima’s face was now crowded with massive sunspots, and its flows of heat and light were reduced enough to make a perceptible difference. The climate
was more like a crisp late autumn afternoon, from what Yuri remembered of the North Britain of his boyhood. Sometimes there was even a sparkle of frost on the green leaves in the little
colony’s fields, and the ColU fretted about its strawberries. Yuri remembered how Mardina had once told him how stable this stellar system was. No dinosaur-killer rocks here, and so on. But
the star itself, it seemed, was in fact a source of instability. And the planet too, with that geological uplift they’d long been observing to the north. Not that they could do anything about
all that but endure.

And then there was Mardina’s pregnancy.

Once they had begun their awkward, rather businesslike lovemaking, she had conceived quickly, Yuri suspected to their mutual relief. The ColU, in its role as family doctor, had insisted on
tracking the stages of the developing pregnancy by the book. So the human-event calendar in their heads had filled up with more memorable moments: the day the morning sickness started, the day the
bump was first visible to Yuri, the day Mardina felt the first kick, the day she let Yuri feel a kick. Now she was coming to term, and soon there would be another monumental event for their
memories: the birth of a child.

The farm was developing too. With the aid of the ColU it was proving easy for them to extend their few small fields, each coated with terrestrial topsoil and watered by irrigation ditches
running from the lake. While the growing stuff, lurid Earth-green, had attracted the attention of the local wildlife – including a flock of spectacular kites the size of herons that
periodically came down to investigate – a potato leaf was essentially inedible to an Arduan, and once the crops were established there were no native blights that could harm them. All this
had been planned for. The ColU had the capacity to support fourteen people, and their offspring; to provide for one couple was well within its ability.

But after four years on Per Ardua, to Yuri’s eyes – especially when he returned from a hike to the lake or the forest, and he saw it as a whole, from afar – the farm, their
little colony, still didn’t look like it fitted in here, in the Arduan landscape. The rectangular fields with their neat rows of Earth-green plants, the tidy geometry of their conical house,
the exclusion of the local Arduan life – even the dirt discoloured by their footsteps and the churn of the ColU’s wheels – the whole thing looked like an unhealed wound on the
face of this world.

Mardina, however, looked less out of place. They had both abandoned their ISF-issue outfits by now, and wore looser clothing mostly made from local materials. In her tunic and short-cut
trousers, coolie hat and bark sandals, and with her skin coated with grey-orange Arduan dust, Mardina wore the shades of the planet. Humans had come here to colonise Per Ardua. But, Yuri thought,
what was really happening was that Per Ardua was colonising the humans.

And what drew all three of them, including the ColU, away from the farm and deeper into the embrace of Per Ardua were the builders.

On another dull day, their chores done, on impulse Yuri and Mardina trekked out to the lake. It was midday, by their human clocks. The ColU was already out at the shore,
pursuing its own interests.

Mardina had become fascinated by the builders’ big projects around the Puddle: the dams that obstructed the inflow streams from the higher ground to the north – dams established long
enough now to have created extensive floods behind them – and the more mysterious middens on the southern shore, with their banks and arcs. She walked along the lake’s northern shore,
capturing images on her slate and sketching maps and diagrams with a stylus. ‘We still have no idea what all this is for. But whatever the hell they’re doing here, it’s evidently
a lot more interesting than us digging in a few potatoes. Does it ever strike you how incurious they’ve been about us recently?’

That was true. The builders around the lake, a few hundred individuals gathered in a dozen small bands, all seemed part of a single community. Once the group around the nursery area on the
western shore had got used to the idea that these strange, lanky, stemless creatures and their big rolling box were harmless, the other bands had soon seemed to pick up the same message, and
stopped reacting to them. Unless you stood right in front of one and somehow impeded its progress, the builders just ignored the humans, spinning around you as if you were of as little interest as
a lump of rock.

‘I think they’re working up to something,’ Mardina said now. She sounded breathless, and she sat on a lump of rock, her slate on the ground beside her. It was another chilly
day and she wore an old fleece jacket over her stem-bark tunic. ‘All this work, the dams and mounds. They run around like this all the time, but the activity seems to be getting more intense
every time I come out here.’ She massaged her lower spine with both hands; backache had plagued her pregnancy.

‘Maybe.’ Yuri squatted on the ground beside her, dug a water bottle out of his flask and handed it to her.

She waved it away. ‘You go find the ColU. I’ll stay and watch a while. Wouldn’t want to miss the show, whatever they’re planning, if it all happens to kick off
today.’

He stood. ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’

He knew what reaction he’d get for that, and he got it. ‘You’re worse than that bloody nursemaid on wheels. My brain is still functioning, more or less, thank you, so
don’t fuss, ice boy. Just piss off and go and annoy the ColU.’

‘All right. You’ve got water, you’ve got—’

‘The flare pistol, yes, I’ve got it, and I’ll fire it up your defrosted arse if you don’t
bugger – off.
’

So he did.

He soon found the ColU.

The big machine had rolled up to one of its own favoured sites for builder-watching, which was the eastern shore. Here there was no intense construction activity, as there was at the north and
south shores, and no nurseries as at the west. The builders were always busy here, but engaged on smaller-scale tasks. For instance they had built an elaborate series of traps out into the lake
water, from which they extracted small fish-like creatures, with stem-based skeletons like the rest of the wildlife but wrapped in a skin-like streamlined webbing – a casing easily unwrapped,
and the contents picked apart and incorporated into other bodies.

And the builders weren’t so busy that they could not be distracted by a dancing robot.

Of course the ColU couldn’t really dance; it was built more like a tank than a ballerina. But, given Mardina’s lead, it had become ingenious at simulating builder-dancing with the
forest of manipulator arms that sprouted from its deck. Now, before an audience of three builders, all adults – of course there would be three, or nine, or twenty-seven of these creatures of
three-fold groupings – the ColU put on a show. It held up heavy-duty arms to simulate the three main limbs of a builder, and while it couldn’t literally make its puppet-builder spin
around, with a kind of sleight of hand, its smaller arms twisting and writhing, it made it
look
as if it was spinning, accompanied by the nods, rocks and gestures that characterised
builder movements.

The builders were not watching passively. They spun and dipped in their turn, as if they were speaking to each other as well as to the ColU – as if it had been accepted into some kind of
conversation.

One of them was injured, Yuri saw; it had a damaged leg stem, broken near the base, so that it hobbled, its spinning a little off-balance. And as Yuri approached, he sensed a strange, intense
smell, a smell of the lake, the stems – the scent of builders, amplified and enhanced, a scent reproduced artificially by the ColU.