Proxima (29 page)

It was all fine and dandy, a family relationship to be admired and envied, and something that both their father and mother would have been proud of. It was just that Stef had no memory of any of
this before the damn Hatch on Mercury had opened.

The news of the discovery had quickly leaked, and the Hatch had been a sensation for about twenty-four hours. It was after all evidence of alien intelligence in the solar system. But a Hatch
leading nowhere had since been largely forgotten, or dismissed as a hoax, though it still trailed conspiracy theories like a comet tail.

But Stef was left with a massive rewiring of her own past.

Before the Hatch, she had been an only child. After it, suddenly she had a twin. Not only that, she suddenly had a whole different lifetime behind her, intertwined with that of her twin. Papers
that had been to her sole accreditation, for instance, were now under joint authorship with her sister. She’d read some of them; they were much as she remembered writing them, but not quite
– not significantly better or worse academically – and there were others, reflecting bits of work she couldn’t remember, that she’d never generated herself at all.

Only Stef remembered her solitary past
before
. Nobody else. Everybody in her life, including colleagues she’d known since her graduate-student days, thought of her now as half of
a pair, not Stef alone. Not even King and Trant, who had been there at the moment of transition, remembered the old timeline.

Not even Penny remembered it. As far as Penny was concerned, their joint careers had just carried on, after a hiccup as Stef had tried to absorb what had happened at the Hatch. To Penny, Stef
was a sister who had suddenly developed a kind of selective amnesia.

And maybe that was what it was. Some kind of mild craziness, perhaps triggered by some bizarro radiation field leaking from the alien artefact into which she’d climbed. That was the
simplest explanation, after all, that her own perception, her memory, was somehow faulty. Though she’d looked hard, Stef hadn’t found a single shred of evidence to contradict the
reality of it. The alternative, that
history
had somehow been changed around her, that the fault lay in the external universe rather than in her own small head, seemed an absurdly
over-elaborate explanation by comparison.

She didn’t believe that, however. She knew herself, she knew her past, her life. And
this
past wasn’t hers.

She’d learned not to talk about this, not to anybody – not after the first few minutes of utter bafflement, up there on Mercury, in her pressure suit, in the Hatch, facing a sister
she’d never known existed, and everybody had stared at her in dismay as she babbled out her confusion. After all she’d rather be working on kernel super-physics than spend the rest of
her life on medication and therapy intended to rid her of ‘delusions’. She wouldn’t even talk to Penny about it, despite her sister’s tentative attempts to break through the
barrier. Stef had been very happy to see Penny posted to a different planet, happy to just get on with her work; at least the work had stayed a constant comfort.

But now here was this summons from Earthshine, evidently intended to bring the two sisters together.

It seemed to Stef that despite much study and commentary, even while everybody acknowledged their power, most experts were unsure what the real agenda of the Core AIs might be. The three antique
minds, a legacy of a difficult past, had no formal role in human society, no legal status – no rights, in a sense. But everybody knew that human agencies, from the UN and nation states on
downwards, had to deal with them. Their power was recognised the way you would acknowledge the power of a natural phenomenon, a hurricane; you couldn’t ignore them, but they were outside the
human world. And unlike hurricanes, the Core AIs could think and communicate.

Now Earthshine had chosen to communicate with Stef and her sister. Why? That depended, Stef supposed, on Earthshine’s own agenda. Maybe Earthshine had some kind of insight to share. But
did she want her personal tangle of a life to be unpicked by such a monster?

On a personal level she was repelled. But on an intellectual level she was intrigued.

She acknowledged the note, logged the trip in her personal schedule, and with relief went back to work.

S
tef Kalinski dropped from the moon’s orbit to Earth, following the usual leisurely three-day unpowered trajectory. At Earth orbit she had to
wait a day before she was transferred to an orbit-to-ground shuttle, like a snub-nosed plane with black heat tiles and white insulation, its cabin crowded with passengers and luggage.

The little craft glided down through the air with looping, sweeping curves.

On its final track the shuttle crossed the eastern coast of South America, coming down towards a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, flooded by the rising
ocean despite crumbling levees that still lined the coast. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European space agency launch centre, now converted to a surface-to-orbit transit station. Further inland
Stef saw bare ground, scrub, some of it plastered with solar-collector arrays like a coat of silver paint. This site was only a few hundred kilometres north of the mouth of the Amazon. Now there
was no forest, and the river was reduced to a trickle through a semi-desert.

Only an hour after landing at Kourou Stef was being bundled into a small aircraft for her hop across the Atlantic. Like the shuttle the plane was crowded, fully loaded before it was allowed to
take off; these days transport was always communal and always crowded, planes and shuttles and trains and buses, minimal energy usage the key goal.

The plane, powered by turbos driven by a compact microfusion engine, leapt easily into the air. The sky beyond the small, thick windows turned a deep blue; the trajectory was a suborbital hop,
and they crossed the Atlantic high and fast, heading north-east towards western Europe, Portugal and Spain.

As the plane dipped back into the atmosphere over the Iberian coast, Stef wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of this coastline had been changed by the risen sea. Near the
shore she saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines standing out to sea and deflecting a little more sunlight from the overheated Earth. The ocean itself was
green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air.

The plane banked and headed north, streaking at high speed through the air. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered
bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. Once across the Pyrenees they left behind the mid-latitude desertification zone and the ground gradually became greener. But even in central France Stef
glimpsed great old cities abandoned or at least depopulated, the conurbations’ brown stains pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed. Over
northern France the plane swept west, circled, and then descended into an easterly headwind. Stef saw something of the Seine, more abandoned towns on a glistening floodplain. Away from the river
olives grew in neat rows on dusty ground, a sight you would once have seen in southern Spain, an agriculture suited to the new age.

At Paris, the big old airports were no longer in use. Instead, with a stab of sharp deceleration, they were brought down at a small airport in a suburb called Bagneux, just south of central
Paris itself, a clutter of ugly twentieth-century buildings cleared in great stripes to make room for the runways. There was another brisk transfer made mostly in silence; there was no
documentation, but every passenger’s identity, security background and infective status were seamlessly checked with non-invasive DNA scans.

Soon Stef was through the process, and found herself and her minimal luggage alone in a small driverless electric car that whisked her north towards the city centre. She’d not been to
Paris before, and the cramped streets swept by at bewildering speed. Somewhere the Eiffel Tower still stood proud, but around her she saw only walls of ancient sandstone stained by floodwater.
Although this was still the political capital of the country there were few people around. Wealthy Parisians had long ago decanted to the cooler climes of southern England – Angleterre as it
was known now – and the poor, presumably, had died out or drifted away.

She glimpsed the Île de la Cité, standing in the turbid waters of the Seine, where the roofs of Notre Dame were plastered with solar panels. A huge banyan tree sprawled before the
cathedral, rooted in the flooded ruins of surrounding buildings.

At last the car brought her to the Champs-Élysées, an avenue even a first-time visitor like Stef could not fail to recognise. There was a fair density of traffic here, and
pedestrians hurrying beneath sun-shade awnings. The car stopped outside a high, elaborate doorway, where a man stood in the shade, beside a slim woman in the uniform of the ISF. The man, of course,
was Earthshine. And the woman was Penny Kalinski, Stef’s impossible sister.

Earthshine, who cast a convincing shadow when he stepped into the light, bowed to Stef as she climbed out of the car. ‘Greetings,’ he said in his cultured British
accent. He made no attempt to shake Stef’s hand, but wafted his fingers through the lintel of the doorway; pixels scattered from his fingertips like fairy dust. ‘At least in European
manners, this is how to announce one is only a virtual presence. I hope this suit – that’s how I think of my various bodies, as “suits” – is acceptable to you
both.’

‘It’s fine,’ Penny said. She was looking steadily at Stef. Then she approached her sister, one pace, two.

Stef stood rigid, almost at attention beside her luggage, unwilling to respond. There was a stiff moment.

Penny said, ‘Here we are, in person together, for only, what, the fourth time, the fifth? Since—’

‘Since the Hatch opened.’

‘Right.’ Penny stepped back, subtly. ‘Sorry. Old habits die hard. Even after all this time. We always hugged, before.’

Earthshine watched this exchange with lively interest. ‘The “always” applies to you, Penny Kalinski. To what you remember. But to your sister Stef, the “always”,
the past before the Hatch incident, did not include you at all.’

‘That’s right,’ Stef said. ‘Lucky me. Suddenly I gained a sister.’

A look crossed Penny’s face, like the passing shadow of a defunct Heroic Generation sunshield. ‘And I,’ she said, ‘feel like I lost one.’

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Earthshine. ‘Fascinating. But here we are standing in the heat. Please, come into the shade, both of you . . .’

The old building extended to several storeys and an underground extension. For Stef, the most striking feature of the ornate interior was a sweeping marble staircase down which the virtual
projection of Earthshine marched with convincing footfalls, his shadow shifting in the soft lighting. ‘Once this was an Italian-owned bank,’ he said, ‘but it has been put to many
other uses over the centuries. Including a bookstore, when they still had paper books. A real historical relic . . .’ Cleaning robots worked discreetly.

They reached a relatively small, cool, windowless, underground reception room, where Earthshine invited them to sit on overstuffed armchairs, and offered them water, American-style soda, coffee,
from a self-service counter. Penny took a coffee, Stef a glass of water. The room was without decoration, save for a big block of what looked like sea-eroded concrete on one wall, maybe half a
metre across, its deeply pitted face marked with a mesh of concentric circles and arrowing lines, apparently intentionally carved. Stef remembered a similar design on a brooch Earthshine had worn
before. The peculiar item distracted her; it looked elusively like some kind of map, a schematic, but she could not have said a map of what.

‘So,’ Earthshine said, sitting with legs crossed, fingers steepled. ‘It’s good of you to have come so far to meet me – and to take a break from your work schedules,
which I know is a sacrifice for both of you. Thank you too for agreeing to put up with each other’s company, at least for a short while. Welcome to my underground lair! Or one of them.’
He smiled, with a show of apparently charming self-deprecation. ‘That’s how you think of us, isn’t it? Terrible old monsters, ruling the world from our furtive dens.’

Stef said, ‘I like to think we’re a bit more sophisticated than that.’

But Penny countered, ‘No, you got it about right.’

Earthshine grinned. ‘You contradict each other. In your talk, even in your choice of drinks. Whatever one does, the other must not follow. How fascinating. And yet by behaving this way you
become ever more the mirror images that you each appear to reject . . .’

For Stef all this was picking at a scab. She snapped, ‘Is there a point to this?’

‘Oh, indeed there is,’ Earthshine said. ‘In fact your oddly coupled nature is what I primarily wish to talk to you about. I have followed your trajectories since that strange
day on Mercury when the Hatch was opened. Well – you won’t be surprised to learn that. It’s what you would expect of me, isn’t it? To watch over you all, like some
inquisitive god.’ He leaned forward. ‘I have asked you here, you see, because I have learned something. I have
found
something.’

‘Something to do with us?’ Stef asked.

Penny said, ‘And what’s it to do with you, Earthshine? What do
you
want?’

‘Well, that’s rather nebulous at the moment. Suffice to say—’ He paused, as if choosing his words. ‘I want to stop being afraid.’

Stef stared at him, startled by that peculiar non sequitur. He’d said this calmly, his expression still, faintly artificial. Yet that, somehow, made it all the more convincing.

Penny seemed more aggressive. ‘You, afraid? Afraid of what? You’re an artificial mind stored underground in massively paralleled and distributed processor and memory banks, with your
own dedicated manufacturing units and energy supply. You and your partners rode out the climate Jolts like they were bumps in the road, while millions of us died. What could
you
possibly
be afraid of?’