Proxima

Chapter 65 2202

Five years after Stef Kalinski had disappeared into the Hatch to Proxima—and because of the lightspeed delays, with three more years left before Penny could even in principle discover for sure if her sister was alive or dead—Penny was invited to another major UN-China conference, this time on the cooperative exploitation of solar-system resources, to be held on Ceres, the Chinese-held asteroid.

Once again this was going to be all about politics and economics, not physics, and her first instinct was to refuse. But she came under heavy pressure to attend. As Sir Michael King and others pressed on her—she even got a note from Earthshine—for someone like her, so closely associated with kernel physics, to be invited to a conference on Ceres itself on UN-Chinese cooperative projects was a hugely symbolic gesture, just as before. But, aged fifty-eight now, she was a card that had been played too often, she thought. She was like an ageing rock star pulled out of retirement to celebrate the birthday of one too many Secretary Generals. A statement of mutual trust that, in the light of the ever worsening political situation, every time it was repeated had an air of increasing desperation about it.

And meanwhile there was increasingly bad news from all the worlds of mankind. Recently there had been heavily publicised (and suspiciously scrutinised) “disasters” on both political sides: a tsunami in the Atlantic, a dome collapse in a Chinese colony in the Terra Sirenum on Mars soon after… At first it looked as if each of these was natural, a gruesome coincidence of timing. Then fingers started to be pointed, accusations began to be made. Fringe groups claimed responsibility for the “attacks”, one in retaliation for the other. Some groups claimed responsibility for both.

But neither might have been attacks at all. Penny couldn’t see how you could determine the truth. Perhaps, given the poison of international relationships, the truth, in fact, didn’t matter any more. She was hearing dark conspiracy-theory mutterings of drastic provisions being drawn up by both sides in this gradually gathering war: fleets of kernel-drive battleships being constructed by the UN side, various exotic uses of their own interplanetary technology being planned by the Chinese… She supposed with her contacts she was in a better position than most to ferret out the truth of such rumours. But she preferred not to listen, not to think about it.

And now here she was, summoned to an asteroid. Still, King said with a wink, it might be fun to see Ceres.

The trip itself, her latest jaunt out of the heart of the solar system, began reasonably pleasantly. Aboard an ISF hulk ship running at a third standard gravity, close enough to Mercury-normal for her to feel comfortable, she had her own room, a workstation, and a generous allocation of communication time with Earth and Mercury, even though the round-trip time delays soon mounted up. She got a lot of work done, on a securely encrypted standalone slate. Kernel physics was still a closely guarded secret as far as the UN was concerned, although Penny did often wonder how much the Chinese must have learned through their various intelligence sources by now.

She had to make the trip in stages. Just as hulks were not allowed within the environs of Earth, so no UN-run, ISF-crewed kernel-powered hulk was allowed within a million kilometres of Ceres, the Chinese central base in the asteroid belt. The ISF crews joked blackly about what the Chinese could actually do about it if a hulk crew refused to comply and broke through the cordon, especially if it came in on the delicate Halls of Ceres in reverse, with the cosmic fire of kernels blazing from its rear like a huge flamethrower. But those arrogant kernel-tweakers of the ISF, Penny reminded herself, depended for all their achievements on a wholly inhuman technology: a technology that, some believed, humanity shouldn’t be using at all.

So after a flight of several days from Earth, her own kernel-driven hulk slid to a halt alongside a minor but water-rich asteroid, roughly co-orbiting with Ceres but well beyond the million-kilometre cordon. This battered lump of dusty water-ice was a convenient resupply depot, but mostly it served political purposes, as a kind of customs barrier, Penny saw, in the invisible frontier between the zones of influence of the UN nations and China. Here ships from both sides of the divide could gather, refuel, and exchange cargo, and passengers like Penny.

Penny peered out of her cabin window at the motley craft gathering here. In contrast to the blunt solidity of ISF kernel-powered hulks, Chinese ships, known as “junks” to ISF crew, were little more than sails, some of them hundreds of kilometres across. For propulsion the sails gathered sunlight, or the beams of ground-based lasers. It was a proven technology. Ceres was nearly three times as far from the sun as Earth, and sunlight was much less intense here, but robot ships from Earth with big solar-cell panels had been making use of the sun’s energy this far out since the twenty-first century. Robot riggers constantly worked the great sails. The sails were slow to respond to the tugging of the stay cables, and huge ripples crossed their surfaces, with the sharp light of the distant sun reflected in shifting spots and slowly evolving highlights.

Penny transferred to one of the Chinese junks, aboard which it would take another week to get to Ceres. UN-nation citizens were not allowed aboard such vessels without officially appointed “companions”. In the event, much to Penny’s relief, the aide assigned her was more than acceptable. It was Jiang Youwei, the young man who had similarly been her “guide” during her first visit to Mars five years ago. Jiang was as polite and attentive as ever, and just as pleasant to talk to as long as they stayed away from taboo subjects like kernel physics. And, though not quite as young as he had been, he was still cute enough to fill her idle hours with pleasant daydreams.

Penny settled into the rhythms of the journey easily. After the noisy engineering of the ISF hulks, the junk was peaceful. And by comparison with the heavy push of the hulk’s drive, the microgravity thrust exerted by the ship’s lightsail was barely noticeable, and silent too. Occasionally Penny would feel a faint wash of sensation in her gut, as if she was adrift in some ocean and caught by a gentle current. Or she would see a speck of dust drift down through the air, settling slowly. The Chinese crew, like Jiang, were polite, orderly—maybe a little repressed, she thought, but it made for a calm atmosphere. Even the remoteness of the sun gave her a sense of dreaminess, of peace.

She worked when she could concentrate, and exercised according to the routine politely suggested by Jiang, to avoid the usual microgravity loss of muscle tone and bone mass. She slept a lot, floating in her cocoon-like room, sometimes in darkness, sometimes with the walls set to transparency so that the stars, the sun, the sail with its vast slow ripples were a diorama around her. After a few days it was hard for her to tell if she was asleep or awake. Sometimes she dreamed of the smooth limbs and deep eyes of Jiang Youwei.

It was almost a disappointment when Ceres came swimming out of the sky, and this interval of calm was over.

Chapter 66

At Ceres the junk’s modular hull was gently disengaged from its sail tethers, and was towed inwards through the last couple of hundred kilometres by a small automated tug. Penny, watching the big sail wafting around the sky, could see the logic; the very biggest sails could be a couple of thousand kilometres across or more, bigger than Ceres itself—big enough to wrap up the dwarf planet like a Christmas present, and you didn’t want any accidental entanglements.

At Ceres, the passengers, including Penny, Jiang and a few crew members who were being rotated here, were politely moved into a small snub-nosed shuttle craft, rows of seats in a cramped cabin. As they took their places some of the passengers looked faintly queasy, and others rubbed their arms. They had all been put through a brisk decontamination and inoculation update. The separated pools of humanity, scattered among isolated colonies, were busily evolving their own unique suites of viruses, and each group had to be protected from infection by all the others.

As Penny strapped into her acceleration couch she watched a couple of crew manhandling what looked like a piece of cargo into this passenger cabin. It was a rough cone that bristled with lenses, grills and other sensors, a retractable antenna array, and a minor forest of manipulator arms, some of which brachiated down to fine tool fittings. The whole was plastered with UEI logos, and various instruction panels in multiple languages. The crewmen cautiously pushed this gadget into place in a gap between the rows of couches, positioned it so the lenses could peer out of the windows, plugged it into the shuttle’s onboard power supply, and backed away.

The shuttle doors were sealed, and a chime filled the cabin. Automated voices speaking Chinese, English and Spanish announced that the final transit to Ceres had already begun. As she was pushed gently back in her couch by the acceleration, Penny stared at the bristling cone. “So what the hell’s that?”

Jiang Youwei smiled. “What do you imagine it is?”

“It looks like a Mars lander, circa 2050. A museum piece?”

To her surprise a panel lit up on the flank of the machine, and an urbane face peered out at her, smiling. “Good morning, Colonel Kalinski.”

“Earthshine. You!”

“Me indeed. Or at least a partial, a download of my primary back on Earth. Lightspeed delays are such a bore, aren’t they? And appear likely to remain so for the indefinite future, given that even the Hatch bridges are limited to lightspeed transits. I wonder how that has constrained the evolution of life and intelligence in the Galaxy…” He smiled, almost modestly; the face was reproduced authentically, so that Penny had the strong impression that she was speaking to a human being stuck inside this box-like shell. “It is good to see you again.”

“You say you’re some kind of partial?”

“Of course. I am considerably limited compared to my primary. However I download my memory store regularly, and when I am returned to Earth there will be a complete synchronisation.”

Jiang said, “That sounds schizophrenic, sir.”

“Oh, probably,” Earthshine said breezily. “But you should remember that I, or rather my primary, am already a fusion of nine human consciousnesses. Already a chorus of voices sing inside my head, so to speak.”

Penny was irritated by this distraction from her mission, from the approaching asteroid. “I didn’t even know you were aboard the junk.”

“I considered renewing our acquaintance. Your young guardian here said it might be best not to disturb you during the flight.”

“He did, did he?” She glared at Jiang, who, not for the first time in their acquaintance, blushed. “What am I, your grandmother?”

“But we had no urgent business,” Earthshine said. “Though we have our long-standing connection concerning your relationship with your sister. Of course the two of you are now separated, presumably by light years, presumably for ever.”

She glanced at Jiang. Officially, he knew nothing of her complicated past. His face showed no expression; she could not tell what he knew or not.

She turned back to Earthshine. “So why are you here?”

“Two reasons. First—”

“The conference?”

“Yes. Though it is far from a summit, it is one of the most high-profile UN-Chinese contacts proceeding anywhere just now. Your own presence, Colonel, is an indicator of that. And we—my fellows in the Core—believe we should back, visibly and publicly, such initiatives as the cooperative development of outer solar system resources being discussed here. So here I am.”

“And the second reason?”

“I wanted to see the asteroid belt. Simple as that. I have developed something of an obsession with the violent origins of our currently peaceful worlds… Call me a cosmic-disaster junkie. Ceres, you know, is the only truly spherical asteroid, the only one differentiated, that is with an internal structure of a rocky core, a water ice mantle and a fractured rocky crust. It is a dwarf planet technically, not an asteroid at all. And it comprises about a third the mass of the whole of the belt. But once there were thousands of such objects here in the belt, all of them relics of the ancient days, of the formation of the solar system.”

“All gone, except Ceres,” Penny said.

“Yes.” Two manipulator arms swung; two small metal fists collided with a tinny clang. “All smashed to pieces in collisions. That’s why there are so many metal-rich asteroids out there. They are relics of the cores of worlds like Ceres, whole worlds smashed to bits. Violence, everywhere you look! We crawl around our solar system like baffled children in a bombed-out cathedral.”

Jiang frowned. “That is not an original perception. It is the nature of the universe we inhabit.”

“True. But it’s not the violence of the past that haunts me. It’s the mirror-image violence that may lie in our future…”

Penny tried to puzzle this out. She remembered how Earthshine had spoken of being afraid, all those years ago, over her father’s grave. Now he seemed to be becoming more irrational, obsessive. Haunted by visions of primordial cosmic violence? Was it possible for a Core AI to become insane? If so, what would the consequences be? Or perhaps, she told herself, he was actually becoming more sane. Facing realities not yet perceived by mankind. She wasn’t sure which was the more disturbing alternative.

Another chime informed them that the transfer was already nearing its end. Penny felt a soft deceleration pressing her against her restraint, and she strained to look ahead through the shuttle’s blister carapace. At last she saw Ceres itself, a small world fast approaching. In the attenuated sunlight, it looked at first glance like the far side of the moon, heavily cratered. But transparent roofs sprawled across swathes of landscape, roofs under which the green of life could be glimpsed. There were towers too, drilling rigs of some kind, so tall that they bristled at this world’s sharp horizon, and a belt of gleaming metal circled what she presumed was the world’s equator.

“That belt is the mass driver,” Jiang Youwei murmured, beside Penny. “Or one of them. A great electromagnetic sling that hurls sacks of water ice and other volatiles from Ceres all over the asteroid belt, and indeed to Mars. Some asteroids, you know, are virtually pure metal, or metallic ore, with not a trace of water or other volatiles, and so are unable to support human life independently. Because of the water it exports, Ceres has turned out to be the key to the exploitation of the whole belt.”

There was another warning chime. The shuttle tipped up and descended nose down, alarmingly, towards a landing field of what looked like concrete, heavily marked with recognition symbols and surrounded by giant structures. The gravity of Ceres must be so low, Penny thought, that the descent was more like a docking with a huge space station than a landing on a respectable planet, on Mars or Mercury or Earth.

In the last seconds the craft tipped up with a rattle of attitude thrusters, and the descent slowed to a crawl. They landed, feather-soft.

The shuttle rolled towards a tremendously tall, sprawling building, and nuzzled easily up against a wall. A chime, and the passengers began to unbuckle. Once they were out of their seats, Penny stumbled slightly in a gravity so low it was hardly there at all.

There was a clicking of latches, and then the shuttle’s nose section swung back, leaving a round portal through which they could walk. A handful of official-looking types in sober business suits, and a couple of armed soldiers, were waiting beyond the portal. Over their shoulders Penny glimpsed a vast open space, spindly pillars, a high ceiling through which sunlight glinted, and beneath which huge birds flapped—no, she saw, they were people, people flying through the air using some kind of skeletal, bat-like wings. The sunlight was supplemented by the light of huge fluorescent panels that seemed to be suspended from the ceiling. In this vast, cavernous space, lesser buildings clustered on a smooth floor, entirely contained by the great roof. The structure was so huge that Penny thought she could see a slight curvature in the floor, as if the building sprawled over the very horizon. Well, perhaps it did.

Two women waited for Penny, with Jiang and Earthshine. The apparent senior, small, sober, perhaps forty years old and dressed in a sombre black suit, introduced herself as Shen Xuelin. “Welcome to the Halls of Ceres. I am deputy director of the colony here, and chair of the Resources Futures conference to which you have kindly agreed to contribute.” Her English was good, if anything over-precise, her accent a kind of neutral east coast American. She introduced the younger, uniformed woman beside her: Wei Ling, a captain in a dedicated division of the Chinese national army. “I apologise for the presence of an armed officer at my side,” Shen said. “And for our inability to offer you the full freedom you requested, sir,” she said to Earthshine.

Penny, turning, saw that the AI’s cone-shaped host was being hoisted by a couple of the shuttle crew onto a kind of hovering platform. She had to laugh. “You’re going to be rolled around like a remote-controlled kid’s toy, Earthshine.”

“It is purely a routine precaution—”

“Please don’t apologise, Madam Shen.” Earthshine’s voice was strong, confident, projected as if a human being was standing here with them. “Given the current political situation it is quite understandable. I half expected you to turn me back altogether.” Shen checked a watch. “The morning session of the conference has another hour to run. Would you care to join us?” Shen led them to a walkway that stretched across the floor of the tremendous building. “I would advise you to grab the handrail…”

The walkway was a track of some yielding material that rapidly built up speed. Penny found herself tilting forward, disconcertingly, though she had no inner sense of tipping. Glancing down, she saw that the surface of the track had rucked itself up so that it held her at an angle, compensating for the acceleration. A neat low-gravity trick. “Clever,” she said.

Shen said with some pride, “An ingenious design but not one that everybody finds comfortable. The mixing up of the vertical and horizontal…”

Penny noticed that Jiang had turned very pale. She had to grin. “Bearing up, Mars man? If you’re going to vomit I’ll find you a sick bag.”

“That will not be necessary,” Jiang said, a little sternly. “Madam Shen, I was intrigued by the conference agenda.”

“Indeed,” said Shen. “We have already had productive sessions on ambitious plans to exploit such resources as the gas giant atmospheres, remote moons like Titan and Triton, even Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects. With our experience of Ceres and the asteroids we feel confident about approaching the ice moons and dwarf planets of the outer system, even though we must seek alternate energy sources to sunlight.”

“You mean,” Earthshine said provocatively, “you need the kernels.”

“That is one possibility,” Shen said, a little stiffly. “There are other energy sources. The mining of gas giant atmospheres for fusion fuel, for example. This will require an industrial effort on a scale of an order of magnitude more ambitious than anything seen in the present day. This is surely a challenge for the next generation, and even then we believe the pooled resources of all our societies, that is of the Greater Economic Framework and of the nations dominated by the UN quasi-government, will be necessary to achieve such a task.”

Earthshine said sadly, “But that cooperation looks a lot less likely than it did a couple of weeks ago.”

“Indeed…”

Penny was only half-listening. As she moved deeper into this building she got a deepening sense of its gargantuan scale, the roof far above her like some planetarium sky suspended by needle-slim pillars, the clusters of buildings on the floor like whole villages enclosed by the greater structure. She recognised official buildings, squat military-style bunkers, and refectories, dormitories, hospitals—but there were schools too, around which she saw children playing, leaping, flapping in the air. And bars, games rooms, hotels, and a giant sports arena where, as she glimpsed through a structure of lacy scaffolding, what looked like a low-gravity version of basketball was being played. There was a continual hubbub of noise, reflecting from the hard common floor and from the roof far above, a jumble of human voices, scraps of music, the occasionally whir of air pumps and fans. And around the invisibly slim pillars people flew, many of them young, as Penny might have guessed, gliding easily on extended bat wings strapped to their arms.

“You need not worry.”

The English words were heavily accented. Penny turned to see that the young soldier had spoken to her, Captain Wei Ling, clutching her remote-control slate. Wei smiled.

“I’m not… Worried about what?”

Wei pointed upwards; her hand was encased in a white glove. “That the roof will fall. Even children born here fear that. Our architects take advantage of the low gravity of this small world to create such structures as this, possible on no other world inhabited by humanity. But it seems some primal instinct is violated by the sight of an artificial sky.”

“You sound proud of all this. Were you born here?”

“No. I am a native of Earth. But as a Chinese I am proud to witness this, yes. Access to space has unleashed a native genius in my people, I think. Please prepare yourself for the terminus of the track.”

Chapter 67

The conference hall to which they were led was itself huge, and neatly if conventionally laid out with a large stage, a giant screen, and rows of seats in queasy-looking low-G-steep elevated banks.

But the seats were mostly empty. Something was wrong, Penny saw immediately. The delegates, many arguing loudly, were crowded before big screens filled with a blizzard of images, news channels, science feeds and other updates. Penny recognised some of the delegates, from both China and the UN nations: politicians, scientists, engineers, writers, even a few artists. Such was the noise of raised voices in the room that Penny couldn’t make out a word coming from the multiple talking heads on the screen. A few faces turned to look at the newcomers, especially at Earthshine’s outlandish avatar body, but they soon returned to their frenetic debating.

“Ah,” Shen said, glancing at Wei. “I see the announcement has been made.”

“I am hearing it,” Earthshine said, faintly distracted.

Penny frowned, peering at the screens. “What announcement?”

Shen said, “I had hoped we would be given a few more hours, that our agenda would not be disrupted…”

“What a dispiriting sight,” Earthshine said. “Even here the delegates have retreated into their respective packs. They came all this way, to this enchanting world in its wan sunlight, to discuss what might have united mankind: a unified expansion into the unimaginable wealth of the outer solar system. Now here we are, huddled in our tribes. And, look, the only place one side is talking to the other is at that island where they’re serving coffee.”

“Well, at least that’s something,” Penny murmured.

Shen Xuelin glared at Earthshine with unexpected hostility. “You speak as if you are aloof from the fray. The Core AIs have been a force in geopolitical affairs for decades. Indeed, a significant fraction of Earth’s resources is diverted to sustaining you and your brothers. If we are in difficulties now—well, it is because of a situation you have played a hand in shaping—”

“Never mind that,” Penny said sharply. “What announcement? What’s going on here?”

The upper portion of the cone robot, bristling with manipulator arms, swivelled towards her. “Yes, you daydreamed away much of the transit aboard the lightsail ship in your cabin, didn’t you? Typical of you scientists, frankly, while events on Earth and elsewhere have increasingly turned ugly. Colonel Kalinski, even you must have heard of recent incidents that have caused so much concern—”

“Don’t patronise me,” she snapped. “I know about the Atlantic tsunami, the punctured dome at Terra Sirenum—”

“Both relatively minor events in themselves,” Shen said. “Unless you were personally involved, of course. The loss of life at our colony at Sirenum was actually greater than that caused by the tsunami. What matters is that specific accusations are beginning to be aired, even in the UN chambers. Such as, maybe the tsunami was triggered by the implantation of a deep bomb, as developed by our own government for exclusive use on Mars in the terraforming project. Colonel Kalinski, the tsunami, the Mars dome break, other incidents, may or may not have been caused by provocative agents on either side. But the incidents did serve to show up our respective vulnerabilities. And I have to tell you that it is New Beijing that feels the more vulnerable. You have the kernels. This situation cannot continue. Our governing councils have therefore determined to take action, leveraging our own strengths, in response to the implicit threat of kernel technology—”

“I get it,” Penny snapped. “So why all the fuss here today?”

Shen said evenly, “Because of what has been announced by our government in New Beijing.” She pointed to a corner of the big screen where an announcement, in Chinese but subtitled in English, was repeating over and over.

It took Penny a couple of minutes to figure out that the Chinese had ordered their military forces in space to divert a small main-belt asteroid onto a collision course with the Earth.

Even Jiang looked shocked; evidently he hadn’t heard of this.

“As an engineering problem it was simple,” Shen said. “As you can imagine. And, so I hear, the project has been under development for some years.”

“You wouldn’t do this,” Penny said. “Your own people—billions of them—”

“The asteroid could be manipulated to deliver selective strikes.”

Earthshine grunted. “Knock out one side of the Earth and not the other, right? That’s a dangerous game, Madam Shen; it’s a small planet.”

“But we have many years to sculpt this tool,” Shen said. “The rock is on a long-duration orbit; it will take years to reach Earth. We are publishing a detailed timescale, including branch points where it will be possible to divert the rock. This long timetable is deliberate. It contains deadlines by which we insist that certain peaceful measures must be conceded by the UN. Such as, no more monopoly of emigration to Per Ardua. And, most importantly, a full sharing of the kernel and Hatch technology. The intention is not to smash a rock into the Earth, but to force concessions from the UN.”

Earthshine mused, “A Cold War weapon with a ticking clock. You are ingenious.”

“You say ‘you’,” Shen said regretfully. “I say ‘we’. I have had no hand in this. Nor anybody else in this room, I imagine. Here, we are all—utopians. Idealists. We would not be here otherwise. We are here to discuss a better future of peace and prosperity, but the present drifts towards war. We can only watch events unfold, and hope.” Now she looked at Penny with what seemed like a longing for understanding. “You can see this is all a bluff. To force the UN to concede—”

“But if they don’t back down,” Penny said quickly. “Just suppose—if they don’t agree, and they call your bluff—would you drop the rock? Would you really do it?”

But Shen would not reply. Neither Jiang, nor Wei Ling the helpful young soldier, would meet her eyes.

Earthshine, locked in his avatar, spun and whirred. “Just think, Colonel Kalinski. If not for the kernels, if not for the damn Hatch, we’d be sitting here now discussing joint missions to Jupiter. Instead we’re facing interplanetary war. I wonder if whoever planted that damn material on Mercury knew it would lead to this.”

Jiang gently touched Penny’s arm. “I prescribe coffee. Come…”