It had taken over two days for the Cecilia Payne to descend into the heart of the Sun. It took another two days to return, to climb back through the photosphere, and once back at Larunda it took longer still for Nicola and Poole to be extricated from their unique craft.
In the weeks that followed, the data they had gathered were scrutinised with fascination, fear, and academic rigour. Debate was intense as to whether Nicola was right that the dark matter entities could be called ‘alive’. But they appeared to show co-operative behaviour, in their flocking: they reacted to each other’s presence, at least. There was much debate too as to what energy source they used: what did they eat? – as Nicola had first asked. And there was some speculation as to what might eat them. Could there be a whole dark matter food chain, embedded deep in the heart of the Sun?
Was there even intelligence to be found there?
And what impact might this inner canker have on the Sun’s own internal processes? Ancient studies were dug out, old hypotheses dusted off, suggestions that a dark matter cloud in the heart of the Sun might diffuse the core’s intense heat, or that additional layering of helium ash might suppress the rate of fusion reactions – perhaps it might even, ultimately, destabilise the Sun in some way.
Maybe the dark matter fish weren’t even natives of the Sun. The Sun was just another star, after all; perhaps they inhabited many stars, and had migrated here . . .
Arguments raged.
Meanwhile, as far as anybody knew, the sycamore seed continued to lurk at the heart of the Sun.
After a month, though, the great artefact called the Cache – surely it was an artefact – detached itself from what appeared to have been a fuelling station on the surface of the Sun, rose up, and began a long, slow spiral out away from the star and out among the orbits of the planets. It would take months to span the tens of millions of kilometres between the inner planets – years to return to Jupiter, if it went that far.
It seemed a new phase was beginning.
A few weeks after the Cache’s detachment, Nicola left too, on a routine supply ship. She didn’t tell Poole where she was going, or what her plans were. Evidently she’d just got bored with going over old data.
Poole stayed on Larunda.
He continued to follow the study of the dark matter fish, and the Cache. And he helped out with the station’s routine duties – everything except the cooking. He kept himself to himself at first, but gradually opened up in the company of the station’s staff, Mitch Gibson and Fennell and Kemp and the rest. They were his kind of people, after all, as well as being Poole Industries staff. Slowly, he recovered from the physical side of his descent into the Sun.
And maybe, he thought, he was healing in other ways too. At least here he could stay out of sight of a lingering public fascination in him and his apparent central role.
Then, a full year after his Sun-dive, his mother summoned him home. ‘You can’t hide away for ever, Michael.’ And her projected image opened one hand, to reveal the green amulet on her palm.
THREE
The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds.
Michael Poole Bazalget, ad 2048
20
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En route to Earth Poole sent a note to Nicola, asking her to join him, more in hope than expectation. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her to respond. Not even sure why he felt he needed the support of such a disruptive individual.
Anyhow, she came.
They met at the space elevator Node over Singapore. After descending, they took the intercontinental monorail to the Red Centre of Australia, and then to Tasmania.
Nicola did more sleeping than complaining.
And from there to Antarctica, in the middle of the southern winter.
For the last leg, having obtained UN dispensations through Gea, Poole piloted a small, low-powered, scrupulously clean flitter himself: south across the Southern Ocean until his lights showed the gleam of crumpled ice – the continental glaciers, as opposed to the smoother sea ice – and then west across what was still called, on some maps, the Australian Antarctic Territory. When they got far enough south the sky was pitch dark, save for the faint glow of aurorae – an echo of the energies of the now-distant Sun – and the sparks of a few polar-orbit comsats and habitats and power stations, and the splayed purple glow of a refrigeration laser, dumping waste heat into the sky as it had since its construction in the Recovery era centuries before. Poole flew with spotlights illuminating the icescape below, to give Nicola something to look at.
Meanwhile Poole monitored what was going on out in the Solar System.
Teams of observers were tracking the slow, spiralling trajectory of the Cache, outward from the Sun from which it had detached more than a year ago. This trajectory had already taken the Cache back past the orbit of Mercury, and then to Venus. And then it had sailed closer to Earth than the planet’s own Moon, to be greeted by a flock of human vessels, all resolutely ignored. Now, it seemed, the Cache was preparing for a similarly close fly-by of Mars.
Meanwhile the sycamore seed object was still lost in the heart of the Sun, visible only to neutrino scans and occasional deep-penetrator probes: still sitting deep in the radiation zone, evidently doing no more than observing.
After a year, Poole believed, things had calmed down a little in the wider universe, as well as in his own head. The first sensation at the arrival of alien objects in the Solar System had faded quickly. It had helped that the objects had adopted this apparently orderly behaviour, predictable on a timescale of years. Harry, Poole’s father, had laughed cynically about this. ‘You got to love the human race – shallow as a puddle. An alien craft the size of a small moon is sailing around the Solar System, and another one is sitting in the Sun, and after a few months nobody gives a damn. But at least it lets the serious folk get on with some work . . .’
Work that went on, Poole had thought, a cynic in his turn, without much public scrutiny, as human ambitions accreted around the alien objects – not least Harry’s own schemes, Poole was sure, though Harry rarely shared any of this with his son.
But the news flow was there if you wanted to tap into it. Regarding the Cache, a steady stream of imagery and other data was being returned by the Spaceguard observatories, and by the small fleet of specialist probes, government and private, that with the passing months had gathered to trail the enigmatic object as it made its painstaking way through the inner System.
And, if you paid attention, every so often there was something genuinely new.
‘Dimples,’ Poole murmured.
Nicola frowned, distracted by Antarctica. As they flew, overlays on Virtual displays showed landscapes hidden under the ice beneath the prow: lost twenty-fifth-century townships built on exotic, archaic geographies that had, in the end, been only briefly ice-free. Nicola gazed at these with morbid interest, and without comment.
Now she turned to Poole. ‘Dimples?’
He pointed to a Virtual image, a gleaming cube. ‘On the face of the Cache. Something new. Circular patches, a little darker than the rest. There’s different radar reflectivity when the walls are pinged.’
‘Impact craters? There’s a lot of junk in the inner System, Earth-crossing asteroids and such. And that thing is a big target.’
Poole shrugged. ‘Not as simple as that. We’ve even observed a couple of impacts on the Cache. Mostly the debris just splashes away, or you might get residual rubble clinging to the centre of one of those big square faces. The thing has a non-negligible gravity field of its own. But there’s never any sign of damage, no cratering.’
Nicola looked away, apparently losing interest. ‘Something else, then.’
Poole felt vaguely irritated. ‘Not everything the Cache does has to be mysterious, you know. I keep thinking that this phase of its operation, at least, would have been familiar to the old space
pioneers.’
Nicola snorted. ‘You mean, to people like Michael Poole Bazalget? To a Poole, history is about whichever of your ancestors was perturbing the world at the time.’
‘Earlier than him. Well, I think so. Back in the twentieth century, when they sent the first uncrewed probes out to the planets. The machines themselves were dumb, and for propulsion they only had chemical rockets and gravitational slingshots. So all they could manage was flybys, of Mars and Venus, the outer planets. But it was good enough for a first quick scout to see what was out there, to direct the more ambitious programmes to come. Maybe this is doing the same thing – the Cache, I mean. It’s already taken a good look at what we’re doing on Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon. Now it’s on the way to Mars . . .’
‘I heard the Martians are planning some kind of response – just as they sent a signal last time the sycamore seed sailed past. This time they’re talking about sending a crew out to meet the Cache when it gets there. A mission. Your honorary Uncle Jack is involved again. Well, he is an exobiologist. “Welcome to Mars. Give me a urine sample.”’ She laughed, and looked down at the fleeing ice of Antarctica. ‘And meanwhile, here we are. It’s like Europa down there. Lethe, what a planet this is. Deserts like Mars, those huge salt-water oceans, and this, all jammed together on one world. It’s amazing anything ever evolved here in the first place . . . This ice, though. Is there subsurface life, like the ice moons?’
‘It’s complicated.’ Poole glanced at her. ‘You really don’t know your history, do you? Yes, there used to be subsurface life, in deep, icebound lakes, and at the surface, in sunlit droplets of liquid water under a frozen crust. But it was all endangered when the ice was melted after the Anthropocene. Lost, except for what we could save. And then, when the land was refrozen, we put the life back.’
‘We? We Pooles, right?’
‘We contributed,’ he said dryly. ‘Take a look at the South Pole.’ He tapped a softscreen. Up came an old image of an ice field in springtime, a low Sun, a clutter of buildings half-buried in fresh snow – and a spire, crystalline, too tall to fit into the frame, set precisely at the pole itself.
‘Wow,’ she said ironically. ‘I give up. What is it?’
‘That’s a monument to how Gabriel Poole saved the world, when it was his turn.’
Nicola laughed. ‘I knew it . . .’
It had been in the twenty-fourth century that a kind of minimum point in the post-Anthropocene evolution of Earth’s climate had been reached. At that time most of Antarctica’s ice sheet had been destabilised and lost – the coastal flooding around the world reached its peak – and the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the air reached their highest level. The geosphere, too, was finally responding to the great climatic changes: the solid Earth itself. The ice lost from Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica destabilised long-dormant volcanoes; there were landslides, tsunamis. Human civilisation was an adaptive complex system, a mesh of tightly coupled networks and feedback loops of food and water, raw materials and manufactured goods, energy, money, information, people . . . At that time there were fears that under an unprecedented strain this complex system could collapse. And if it did, it would stay collapsed.
It was a turning point.
‘People finally decided something had to be done. The first space elevators were built, for instance. And geoengineering was suddenly fashionable . . . As for Antarctica, Gabriel’s plan was simple. Even if it took a few centuries of arguments, demonstrations and trial runs to get it approved.’
Ice-free Antarctica had been slowly turning green, colonised by hardy lichen, mosses, a few early tufts of grass. It would have been a long process. The various biotas would have had to adapt to Antarctica’s low light levels and odd seasons: months of darkness every year, then months of continual daylight. But life had adapted here before, as the fossils proved.
‘Once there were forests of huge broad-leaved trees down there. Given millions of years, something like that would have evolved again. But in the end the continent was only ice-free for a few centuries before—’
‘Gabriel Poole got in the way.’
Gabriel had proposed to freeze back out all the water ice Antarctica had lost, thus reducing sea levels and recovering at least some of the lost shoreline territory on all the continents.
‘Oh, and in the process Gabriel was going to draw down some of the excess greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide too. It’s all down there now, in the new ice, stored in stabilised layers – an artificial clathrate, almost, like the methane-bearing permafrost layers Michael Poole Bazalget had stabilised in the north centuries before. The time was right. By the twenty-seventh century the issues had been debated and worked over – and there were already terraforming efforts proposed on Mars. Why, Venus’s atmosphere was already being frozen out.’
‘By another branch of the family?’
He ignored that.
Nicola did seem interested. ‘Big stuff, then. I like big stuff. So how was this achieved? Sun shields, like at Venus?’
‘The UN oversight agencies wanted more control than that. A gradual solution. Nobody wanted to do it too quickly, if it was to be done at all, to risk destabilising the climate again. It was all pretty controversial.’
‘But Gabriel got his big refrigerator?’
‘Pretty much. He built huge pumps that lifted sea water to the centre of the continent, to the top of the old ice dome, and froze it all out, metre by metre. It took five centuries for the drawdown to be complete – the sea-level drop was contained at about a centimetre per year, and the carbon dioxide drawdown at about a gigatonne per year. So the power required was relatively trivial, year by year, a fraction of the planet’s annual output in the Anthropocene days. Now the programme has settled down to long-term stabilisation; you need less refrigerating power because so much of the sunlight is deflected by the ice itself. The power generation nowadays comes from a GUT facility: more compact, cleaner. Even though there was a lot of controversy about applying interplanetary-engine technology to the Earth itself.’
‘But it worked.’
‘It worked.’
Nicola said sourly, ‘And all they gave Gabriel was that poky tower? If they really are going to build a statue to you at the heart of the Galaxy some day . . .’
But then she shut up. The flitter was suddenly flying over a green landscape, vivid in the spotlights, a crumpled plain walled by diverging ice cliffs and scoured deep by ravines and rivers. The contrast with the blankness of the ice was startling.
Poole grinned at her reaction. ‘Gabriel and his successors needed a base on the continent to run the freeze-out programme. So he kept this ice-free – and this is where my mother lives now. Welcome to Princess Elizabeth Land. Listen, my father’s going to be down there too.’
‘Harry? I thought your mother—’
‘She’s the host. And she’s the one with something to say, apparently. But Harry has muscled in, not for the first time in my life. It’s complicated.’
‘You are Pooles. It’s always complicated.’
‘Just don’t provoke him.’ Poole punched a comms console. ‘Strap in, we’re on our way down.’
21
When they arrived, Harry Poole, clutching a drink, was pacing the floor of Muriel’s reception room.
He didn’t seem pleased to see Nicola Emry walk in at the side of his son. ‘You. Why in Lethe do you need to be here? This is a Poole estate. Family business.’
Poole said mildly, ‘Everything that’s happened since the sycamore seed came through the wormhole affects all humanity. Maybe it’s a good idea to have one perspective from outside the bloodline, don’t you think?’
‘Perspective? From her? She’s nothing but a trickster, Michael, and she’ll lead you astray one way or another.’
‘Anyhow, why are you here?’ Poole knew his father. When he was around his son, especially in per
son, it was usually because Harry wanted something; conversely he generally wasn’t around if he didn’t. Now, something about his sheer intensity made Poole nervous.
But Harry grinned easily. ‘We’ll get to that. Anyhow I brought backup of my own. I’m not about to be outnumbered . . . Ah, here comes Muriel.’
Poole seemed to see the scene through Nicola’s cynical eyes. This reception room was huge, a hall with an ice-like, translucent floor over which cushions, chairs, tables were scattered, as well as a few softscreen stands. Any humanity was overwhelmed by the sheer scale. The main feature was an arching picture window facing north – of course north, when looking out from the south pole. Under the glare of artificial lights, a garden was visible, a carpet of green studded with tree clumps that stretched to an ocean shore, on which could be glimpsed sea ice. Poole had no idea what technology was used to keep the huge estate free of Gabriel Poole’s restored ice, even in the Antarctic winter; whatever it was, it was subtle and unobtrusive.
And now, across the light-filled floor, his mother walked. ‘Outnumbered? Backup? Do you have to use such confrontational terms, Harry?’
Muriel wore loose, pale green shirt and trousers, and her reflection was flawlessly rendered in the floor’s smart surface. Even the shoes she wore clicked softly as she took each step. Where Harry was tall, blond, thin to the point of gaunt, Muriel was shorter, darker, with Mediterranean features, grey-streaked hair tied back – and pale grey eyes, a feature associated with the Pooles for centuries. Muriel was the one with the Poole ancestry, in fact, Harry the outsider who had married in and had taken his wife’s surname – as had been the habit with the Poole clan for generations. Michael had got his brown eyes from his father, and had been told they were the ‘wrong’ colour more than once in his life. Ironically Harry hadn’t even kept his own brown eye-colour when he had got himself AS-rebuilt, opting for a more spectacular blue.
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