Proxima (53 page)

On the seventy-first day the ColU called for a cautious slowdown. ‘We are approaching landfall . . .’

This was the single landmass they would encounter before the antistellar point, an Australia-size island continent that, according to the
Ad Astra
maps, lay between their terminator
crossing point and the antistellar. They crept forward over the last of the sea pack ice, wary of its thinning, and then rolled up a shallow beach onto the land. Their floods picked out grimy ice
beneath their treads, and low, eroded-looking hills, icebound, were shadows against the starry sky. They swung north and east, travelling in convoy once more.

Stef said, ‘There has to be an ice cap in the middle of this continent, even if it doesn’t show up in the
Ad Astra
data set. So we’re going to keep to the coastal
fringe. If we get stuck we can always duck out onto the sea ice again.’

‘Actually the air temperature is rising,’ reported the ColU blandly.

After another half-day they came to a stretch of open, ice-free landscape, and they clambered out of the rover to explore. It was some kind of volcanic province, Yuri saw, with hot mud pools,
and slicks of heat-loving bacteria that showed up a brilliant purple and green in their lights. So this was where the local warmth came from. Their breath steamed in the chill air, but Yuri could
feel the warmth of the ground under his booted feet. They all wore head flashlights, which made them look like ghostly alien visitors in this calm, dreaming place. The ColU and Stef happily took
samples and made images.

‘Life all over,’ Liu said.

‘Everywhere you go,’ Stef agreed. ‘There’s surely life even under the ice, on the bottom of the covered ocean, wherever there are hot springs, mineral seeps. The same as
on Earth.’

‘And stromatolites,’ the ColU said.

‘What?’ Stef straightened up, sample bottle in hand. ‘Impossible. Not in the dark. You need photosynthesisers to build stromatolites.’

‘But here they are,’ the ColU said mildly.

It was true. Rising to the west of the bacteria garden, the landscape was covered with shapes like huge mushrooms, with broad tops and wide, deep stems anchored firmly to the ground.

They walked over. Stef stabbed a sampling tube into one big specimen, an unhesitating gesture that made Yuri wince, and extracted a cross-section sample that she inspected by the light of her
head flashlight. ‘You’re right, ColU,’ she said. ‘Kind of. This is a stratified bacterial community. The upper layers do look like they are photosynthesising – by
Alpha light presumably, it must be a very slow process. But further down I think we have mineral chompers, like the heat lovers in the mud pools. Call it a stromatolite, then, but of a strange,
complex sort.’

‘And unimaginably ancient,’ the ColU said. ‘There would be nothing to disturb them here. No predators. And all of this must be a kind of surface expression of the deeper
community, the deep hot biosphere, which won’t care if it’s on the day side or the dark.’

Yuri grunted. ‘I wonder what they think of all the fuss we make up here, then.’

The party spent a day at the site, observing, gathering samples, reflecting and hypothesising. Then they packed up and moved on.

T
he rumble of the heavy vehicles’ passing made the deep ground shudder, briefly.

This unusual event was detected by vast, diffuse senses. Aeon-long dreams were interrupted.

The event was noted, a record of it seeping out through the communities in the deep rocks, where it was interpreted, classified, stored. Nothing came as a surprise to a mind that had already
been two billion years old before the first complex cell had arisen on this world.

The vehicles soon receded, the disturbance was over. And in the chthonic silence the Dream of the End Time resumed.

P
enny Kalinski woke to the sound of laughing children.

In her life, she’d been woken up worse ways, she supposed. Even if the world was threatening to implode around her.

She checked the clock. It was a little before seven fifteen, dome time. Or Paris local time, officially, but dome time was the way she thought of it; sealed up down here in Earthshine’s
bunker, living off an enclosed life-support system, she may as well have been in some hab on Mercury or the moon.

She pushed her way out of bed and padded through to the small living room, where Jiang Youwei lay in his fold-out bed. Jiang was sleeping soundly. He would sleep even through an alarm –
though the one time there had been a genuine problem in the months they’d spent buried down here, when a siren had sounded a warning of contaminants in the recycled air, he’d been on
his feet in a second, his military training kicking in.

Penny went through to the bathroom, and stood under the hot, faintly stale-smelling water of the shower. They only had the two rooms, plus the bathroom; Earthshine had colonised only a small
stretch of the old Channel tunnel, and living space, along with power, air, water and food, was always at a premium. At that they were privileged to have private quarters at all, not to have to
share the big dormitories and shared bathrooms that had been set up to accommodate everybody else.

And the tunnel was crowded now. The inmates were mostly families of support staff and of Earthshine’s drafted-in experts, and the children, grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren
of Sir Michael King, hastily flown in after the Splinter break-up and the closing in of the long cold – the Mighty Winter, as Earthshine called it.

Mindful of limited resources, after a brief shower Penny cut the water and dried off briskly.

Back in the living room the lights were bright. Jiang was up and about, flipping through pages on his slate with a practised finger. He had set a pot of coffee brewing in their small galley
corner. As she passed, he absently handed Penny a full mug.

She pulled her clothes out of their small closet. She wore ISF-issue coveralls, self-cleaning and self-repairing, and all she had to do was shake out the detached dirt every day, a great saving
in laundry water. She asked Jiang, ‘Busy day?’

‘Getting busier,’ Jiang said, studying his slate. ‘Maintenance this morning, some diplomatic stuff around noon . . . I will have a late finish. You?’

‘The school this morning, as I recall. After that – well, it depends on the Council resolution at lunchtime, and the fallout from that.’ The latest phase of the ongoing Council
of Worlds talks was due to report back today.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Big day. I guess I’ll see you there.’

Though they were tucked away down here in this hole in the ground, as guests of Earthshine they were intimately connected to developing world affairs. The bloodless war between China and the UN
nations had moved to a new phase in the months since the Splinter had arrived at Earth, and its dust had plunged the world into a sudden winter. A few resulting border conflicts had been easily
contained. To the chagrin of Sir Michael King the rebellion against Chinese rule in Australia had been stomped upon; since then martial rule had been imposed on that continent, and vast numbers of
native Aussies had been shipped out to other Chinese provinces in Indonesia, and further afield.

Across the Earth, indeed across the solar system, a new, uneasy truce had been called, and it still held, just about.

But now a new round of talks had begun, under the nominal chairmanship of the three Core AIs, Earthshine among them, who had emerged from their reclusive hideaways to offer a neutral platform on
which negotiations and attempts at conciliation could begin. These were the so-called ‘Council of Worlds’ talks, usually restricted to the Earth but sometimes, in lengthy sessions
incorporating time delays, with representations from Mercury, Mars, even Ceres. The chair was rotated mostly between Ifa and the Archangel, the AIs based in central Africa and South America
respectively.

Sir Michael King, nearing his century but still in his chair at the head of UEI, was a key contributor. Penny had duties as an adviser on kernel physics. Jiang, one of the few Chinese down here
in the tunnel, was expected to support the sessions with interpretation work, as well as reporting back personal impressions to New Beijing.

Well, the talks had ground on. Now there was a package of measures which seemed all but acceptable to most of the parties on the table: a mutual security pact; a tentative deal on the perpetual
sticking point of the sharing of resources and information, including some Chinese access to kernel science; Earth to be designated a protectorate by both sides, the home of mankind ruled
off-limits as a theatre of war. Whether any of it was going to be accepted was another question.

By the time Penny had finished her coffee, brushed her short hair, and was ready to go, Jiang had left already.

Outside, embedded in its tunnel, Earthshine’s little kingdom was beginning another day.

The big wall-mounted fluorescents, having been dimmed to match the waning of the daylight outside, were back up to full brightness. At this time of day people were on the move, a few night-shift
workers standing down, the rest preparing for the labour of the day. Most of the work was maintenance of the systems that kept them all alive down here. A couple of the wall screens showed images
from around a wintry planet, and on the rest there was a constant feed from the round-the-clock Council of Worlds talks.

Overall the big tunnel refuge had undergone a drastic and rapid transformation. When Penny had first arrived it had been little more than a kind of computer store, survival shelter and
information node. Now, as the families had been moved in, the IT gear had been removed from the public areas, and living spaces had been set out: dormitory and toilet blocks, a small hospital, even
a school for the kids.

And at this time, before the start of the working day, the school playground was full of noisy kids, climbing frames and rope swings, playing games like hopscotch, their voices echoing from the
concrete walls of the tunnel. Penny watched them with a kind of wistfulness, part of her longing to shed the weight of her own decades and join in. But she noticed how pale they were, cooped up
down here, cut off from fresh air and sunshine: a winterbound Paris, under its dismal dust-choked sky and riddled with refugees, wasn’t safe for children. The kids’ health was carefully
monitored, but it seemed to Penny they were growing up with a kind of frantic energy that had to be burned off regularly, like a flare from a gas well.

‘We have become like a space station, buried in the ground.’ The grave voice was Earthshine’s. His virtual stood beside her dressed in the usual sober business suit.

Penny said, ‘I think we’ll have problems if we’re stuck down here too long. Up on Mars, say, you grow up knowing that there’s no escape. Whereas here the kids
know
there’s a liveable environment up there, outside. When they get older, if we’re still here, we’re going to have a lot of difficult teens.’

‘Interesting. I retain enough of my humanity, I think, to sympathise. The need for personal freedom seems to be ingrained in the human animal, to some extent. We accept compromises where
it benefits the family. Beyond that, we resent.’

She had to smile. ‘Is this how you talk to the kids in your school classes?’

‘Not exactly—’

‘Hey!’ A little kid had come up to the fence before them; he had oriental features but a thick Australian accent. Without warning, he took a ball and threw it straight at Earthshine.
The ball passed through Earthshine’s body unimpeded, but there was a spray of multicoloured pixels. Earthshine folded slightly with a grunt of discomfort, and his overall image flickered
subtly as the consistency routines in his infrastructural software strove to recover.

The kid laughed and ran away. Earthshine, back to normal, smiled indulgently.

‘Come on,’ Penny said, irritated. They walked away from the playground. ‘You shouldn’t let them do that to you. It’s disrespectful.’

Earthshine shrugged. ‘Sooner that than they should fear me, my strange unreality. That is a key purpose of my presenting classes in the school, you know. We are selfish, we three of the
Core. Sir Michael’s request to bring down his grandchildren with him changed all that, in a surprising way. Now I see it as my job to protect the children. In a way I think of all of you as
family.’

This kind of interaction always seemed irritating and bizarre to Penny, as if Earthshine was trying to acquire humanity, and was telling her about it step by step in full detail.
‘Shouldn’t the children learn that it hurts when your consistency protocols are broken?’

‘I can live with it,’ Earthshine said heavily. ‘They will learn in time. Colonel Kalinski, I think you are mothering me again.’

That annoyed her. ‘What do you mean, again?’

‘It does not hurt greatly to have a rubber ball thrown through my virtual projection. It did not hurt greatly when my nine parents were merged into one, and I was born. It does not hurt
greatly to be
me
, even though I am not human as you are. You should not pity me.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

He had sounded stern, aloof, inhuman. Now he grinned, infectiously. ‘But it is pleasant to be mothered, I admit that. And now, I see, we’re overdue to meet Sir Michael.’

King stood beneath the largest of the display screens. Leaning on his stick, ignoring the human bustle around him, he glowered up at the news feeds.

The screen showed a blizzard of images, as usual, and voices competed in the air. Penny let the morning’s data rush wash over her in its multiple streams, gathering an impression of the
new day. Maybe this was how it was for Earthshine all the time, she wondered.

She picked out a demonstration in Anchorage, outside the Chinese embassy, to the richest of all the USNA states in the early twenty-third century. The demonstration was, of course, about the
effects of the Chinese asteroid winter. Food shortages were already kicking in, in this year without a summer. In the new, modern cities like Solstice in the far north and south, the power supply
had collapsed as the paddies and marshlands, wired to supply electricity from gen-enged photosynthesis, had faltered in the shadows of the sky. There were even new refugee flows, heartbreakingly
familiar images of families drifting back to the mid-latitude areas once abandoned by their parents or grandparents during the climate Jolts. Even in Paris, Penny had seen a refugee camp set up on
the dead grass of the Tuileries.