The rain cut off, as suddenly as it had started.
There was a soft whirr. Looking around he saw that a bot, comically, was approaching from the café, holding out towels for the customers.
Nicola grabbed a towel and threw it at Poole. ‘What’s this? More penance? Throwing yourself bodily at alien spaceships is one thing. Sitting in the rain is just showing off. Get dry, Poole.’
Muriel grinned. ‘I always thought you were good for him, Nicola. Now – we can shelter in the Iglesia. It’s no longer consecrated – is that the right word? But it’s the most beautiful building in the new city, and I can’t think of anywhere more appropriate to sit the rest of this out.’
Poole frowned. ‘The rest of what?’
Nicola said, ‘The rest of the aftermath. The tsunami didn’t stop here. I told you. The wave rolled on. Casablanca was next. An hour later, Lisbon. And then—’
Poole stood up. ‘We must help. Get back to the flitter.’
Muriel didn’t move. ‘No, Michael. I understand how you’re feeling. Well, I think I do. But there’s nothing you can do. You don’t have the skills; leave it to the experts. Frankly, you’re exhausted. And – everybody knows your face now. You might get yourself lynched.’
Poole slumped back down. ‘I’m too exhausted to argue. The cathedral then?’
Nicola grinned. ‘They used to call it sanctuary.’
As they hurried across the plaza, arms linked, ahead of the return of the rain, Poole thought he heard distant explosions. Thunder from the curdled air, perhaps, or the next giant wave, crashing on the island.
42
They crossed a shining, empty floor, under a vaulting roof supported by crystal pillars. The Iglesia de la Concepción, itself a millennium old, was extraordinarily beautiful, Poole thought.
‘That ceiling seems to defy physics,’ Nicola said. ‘Reminds me of Mars . . . At least, Discovery-era Martian fantasies. Crystal towers by the shores of thousand-kilometre canals.’
‘There was never a rainstorm like this on Mars,’ Poole said sourly. ‘Not for a billion years.’
‘In here,’ Muriel said.
She led them into an alcove, which Poole would learn was called a side-chapel, a calm area with sofas, a table. Enclosed, yet there was a fine view of the overall architecture.
A distant rumble of thunder, a clatter of rain on glass.
‘If we wait, a bot will serve us,’ Muriel said. ‘Food and water. I scoped this out earlier. A place of refuge. We can ask for cots – there’s even a shower, if you want it.’ She made to touch Poole’s hand, that habitual misplaced human instinct, and drew back. ‘I knew you would need a place to—’
‘Hide away?’
‘To rest.’
‘I need to know what’s going on.’ He glanced around for a softscreen, saw none apparent. He swiped his hand at random across a tabletop, which lit up with menus and imagery.
So they spent the rest of that day, and into the night, eating, napping, talking desultorily.
And they followed the progress of the Atlantic disaster as it unfolded.
As Nicola had said, the Canaries, Tenerife, had only been the first target. Slowly, slowly, the tremendous ripples of the tsunami spread out from the Probe’s strike point.
After three hours, the wave reached the southern coast of Britain. Muriel asked for reports from Goonhilly, the country’s principal Poole compound. At nearly a hundred metres’ elevation and well inland the site was not affected by the tsunami surge, but the weather was soon battering the ancient Mound. The south coast of England would be hit hard, but London was comparatively secure.
After six hours, the wave reached the Atlantic coast of North America.
Reports started to come in from the old east coast cities, from Boston and New York through Miami, many others. Once, before the post-Anthropocene flooding, forty million people had lived within a few tens of kilometres of the east coast, and a mere ten metres or less above the pre-industrial sea level. Today the population was much smaller, and the surviving cities were jewels, preserved through millennia. Now, after all that history, such cities were being threatened again.
Listening to even the most factual reports on all this, Poole sensed a growing, global anger.
After another few hours a report came in from Harry, on Manhattan Island.
By now it was night at Achinet, and the pillars of La Concepción glowed with a soft, inner light. In New York it was still daylight. Harry was standing in what looked like a lane cut through a landscape of rubble.
‘Look around, Michael, Muriel. Can you see? I’m standing on the ancient Via West 72, near the Hudson shore. And I’m really here, by the way.’ He bent, picked up what looked like a lump of concrete, and tossed it aside. ‘See? In the flesh. I wanted to come see for myself.’ He pointed back over his shoulder at the river. ‘You remember the old flood defences? Standing high out of the water, from the days when they beat back the sea level. Left intact as monuments. But they were never designed for this.
‘When it was New York’s turn, when the wave reached us . . .’ He walked forward; the viewpoint tracked back to keep pace. He pointed. ‘So the wave came over here, broke, smashed everything flat, and then, as it drained thataway, it dragged the debris back. Which did even more damage, as it scoured its way through the streets. Now, in places, the rubble is piled up five or six metres high. The labour of centuries turned to a heap of junk, just like that.
‘You can see they barely started, not even to clear it, just to create a way through. Many of the food synth machines are down, and even the medical-supply fabrication stations. So there’s a massive air effort going on to maintain supplies of food and clean water. There are fears of dysentery and other diseases. Dysentery! In New York, in the thirty-seventh century . . .!’
The view jumped sharply. Now Harry, grimy, looking tired, was walking across green grass. In the distance was a wall of skyscrapers, some of them very ancient – and some of them bore the discolouring, still, of the most extreme post-Anthropocene flooding, ancient tide marks worn like badges of courage.
‘He’s in Central Park,’ Muriel said. ‘Look. There’s the Paradoxa dome.’
This was a silvered sphere four hundred metres tall, containing tens of millions of tonnes of dry ice: carbon dioxide sequestered from the air.
‘The water got in even here,’ Harry said. ‘Into the Park. Garbage, rubble everywhere. But – look up.’
The camera angle swivelled to show a sky crawling with points of light, even in the daylight: the habitats and factories of near-Earth space.
‘The human sky. Full of industry and enterprise and life. And on the ground, rubble and floods and debris. Because of the Xeelee. Now look at me again.’
The viewpoint swivelled down, to show Harry’s hard, dirt-smeared face.
‘You know, even those who tried to explain away the Hellas impact as a “probe”, as if it went in just a little too hard, won’t be able to justify this as anything but wanton destruction. The labour of centuries, casually erased. And for what?
‘I can tell you, this is going to change everything. Everything about how we handle this Lethe-spawned Xeelee situation. Everything about the way we run our affairs in the future – even beyond the Xeelee crisis.’
Watching, Muriel sighed. ‘Much as it’s hard to disagree with him, that prediction makes my heart sink. If I had a heart.’
‘And, by the way, take a look at this.’ Harry pointed to the sky again, a lower elevation this time.
The camera swivelled, zoomed, focused. The face of the Moon, almost full, was clearly visible in a clear, daylight sky. And there – Poole spotted the anomaly immediately – in the distorted left eye of the face of the Man in the Moon, in the grey patch that was the Sea of Serenity, a brilliant spark flared.
The next day, the real work of recovery and
restoration began. Poole himself stayed around, working mostly anonymously within Poole Industries recovery projects. But not Nicola. Once again she chose to disappear from Poole’s life.
The first days were the worst. Even after the bodies had been removed, and the initial trauma victims found and treated, whole populations were left without power, food and medical machines, without shelter from the rain in some cases. Even without clean water.
The blame game soon started.
As the days turned to weeks, if relief didn’t come quickly, in places the reach of the UN government crumbled. There were police actions against local hoarders and warlords. Even minor wars.
A few months on, more exotic damage unfolded. The great heat of the impact, it turned out, had created a flood of nitrogen oxides in the air, which in turn had damaged the ozone layer. There was a slow plague of burnt skin, cataracts, skin cancers. The natural world suffered too, with savage wildfires tearing through the Saharan forests and other vulnerable landscapes. And against this background relief efforts had to be mounted on Mars and the Moon.
The healing was desperately slow. The anger gathered.
Six months after the Probe strikes on Earth and Moon, the Xeelee craft emerged at last from the Sun. It rendezvoused with the Cache, which had sailed in from the Martian L5 point to meet it. The strange flotilla began a new spiral path, outward from the Sun, through the Solar System. Something new, it seemed.
Six months after that, Harry Poole summoned his son.
FIVE
And Mars is old. The oldest landscapes on Earth would be among the youngest on Mars. But of course even the old can hide a few surprises.
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43
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The emergency convocation of the UN’s governing councils had been called by Harry himself, as a member of the Xeelee Oversight committee. It was to be held in Britain. And Harry made it clear that he expected his son to attend, in person.
‘Look – I called this meeting, and that’s about as much control of it as I have. But I’m using whatever leverage I can. I picked the location with that in mind. And you, son, have to be here, to remind these windbags and do-nothings of what is possible.’
‘You mean what I did last year, when I went for the Earth Probe with the Crab? It didn’t even work. I was a fly banging my head against a concrete block. I’m no hero.’
‘Oh, yes, you are, for the duration. You ever heard of the kamikazes? Look it up. You have a story, son. And just by being here, you’ll tell that story, even if you don’t open your mouth . . .’
So, a full year after the Probe strike in the Atlantic, Poole found himself alone in an automated surface-to-surface flitter completing a UN-authorised flight towards the south-east coast of England.
This was Kent, and, as he descended, he saw the chalk cliffs, a line of white sunlit brilliance sandwiched between the grey waters of the English Channel and the countryside’s sparsely forested green. Much of this part of the country had been allowed to revert to the wild; Poole’s flitter spooked a herd of some kind of wild cattle, long-horned, that fled through a scraping of ruins.
Then, directly below him, not far from a disused surface road – a straight-line discoloration in the green – he saw a more open area, a couple of hundred metres across: exposed, chalky earth. Around this wound in the forest stood a few compact structures, and one more substantial building, low, glassy. Further out, a rough airfield hosted a huddle of craft not unlike his own. An unusual sight in these conservative times, and itself a marker of a global emergency.
Near that big glass building people walked, out in the sunlight. Poole saw that some of them cast no shadow: Virtuals, then, and not the most expensive variety of projection, which came with shadows. But this was a time of frugal resource usage. So, cheap Virtuals.
Before he was brought in to land Poole called down to his father. ‘Where am I, Harry? And what’s with the ruins?’
‘We’re near the site of an old community called Fokes Tone. And, not by accident, near some archaeology. Take a look.’
Under Harry’s direction Poole’s aircraft banked over that cleared site, and, obediently, Poole looked again. Archaeology? Yes, that made sense; he could see that a layer of topsoil and vegetation had been stripped back, leaving that pale scar in the ground. There was some kind of threefold earthwork towards the middle of the dug-out area, centred on a lumpy mound on a central platform – he touched the smart window to have it magnify the view – no, not a mound, it looked like a statue, a seated figure, arms wrapped round its legs. Headless.
‘A recent discovery,’ Harry said. ‘Found by orbital surveys. Routine stuff in the aftermath of the Probe tsunami, though this place wasn’t directly affected by the waves. The scans picked out that buried statue. Its interpretation is controversial. I think it’s relatively recent. A relic of the Anthropocene, that got lost in the chaos that followed.
‘Michael, you know that in the early Anthropocene era the old British nation went to war with continental neighbours who had succumbed to a kind of technological dictatorship – Britain itself was more or less democratic at the time. Air power was still primitive, but it seems to have been a conflict in the air that was a turning point in that particular war. You can imagine the mythology: outnumbered British fighter planes turning back hordes of continental bombers. I think, for all its archaic look, that this is a monument to that key battle.’
‘How can you tell? I don’t see a sculpture of a plane down there.’
‘No, but that trefoil earthwork is very like the propeller from one of those primitive planes. You know about that stuff.’
‘Kites with fossil-fuel engines?’
‘That was all they had. Yet they went up and fought even so.’
‘And the statue?’
‘A seated figure. The head lost. Too eroded for meaningful detail to be interpreted, and a lot of records were lost in the Bottleneck. But he, she, could be a pilot. A hero.’
‘I don’t feel like arguing, Harry. So, suppose you’re right. Why are we here, rather than in some more comfortable UN location like New Geneva?’
‘We Pooles are British, remember. Or were. History shows the British were as rapacious a bunch of imperialists and colonisers as anybody. But in that particular conflict, at that particular moment, they were alone and vastly outgunned. And they didn’t surrender; they stood, and kept fighting until the enemy backed off.’
‘Symbolism, Harry? Kind of obvious, isn’t it?’
‘I’m dealing with a lot of stubborn do-nothing people here, Michael. I told you, I’ll use anything I can get to win the day. Now, you ready to come in?’
44
The next morning, the elderly artificial sentience Gea was the nominal chair of the opening session of the meeting of what was formally a subcommittee of the World Senate. Shamiso Emry was here; she nodded gravely to Poole.
Gea stood up and made brief introductory remarks.
Then Harry, evidently intent on dominating from the off, got to his feet, tabled a draft agenda, and without preamble began a brisk presentation.
The air at the centre of the room, over a big circular conference table, filled up with a Virtual image of that blunt yet beautiful sycamore seed shape, black as night, by now horribly familiar across the Solar System. One delegate moved back the pitcher of water on the tabletop before her, as if the ship might sideswipe it.
‘So,’ Harry said, ‘after the strikes on Mars, Earth and Moon, the Xeelee came out of the Sun at last.’
The Xeelee: by now, everybody on the planet called it by a name that had once been restricted to the Poole family archives.
‘And when it emerged from the photosphere, it found the Cache there waiting for it. The Cache itself, its work at Martian L5 evidently done, had made a rapid return to solar orbit.’
He snapped
his fingers, and the display changed to a kind of orrery. There was the Sun, and the inner planets hanging like fruit. A path unwound from the Sun to run through the plane of the worlds.
‘And then both craft sailed away from the Sun. Right now, both Xeelee and Cache, moving in formation, are following the same kind of trajectory as the Cache did on its last outing: that is, a spiral track through the plane of the ecliptic. Moving more slowly, if anything.
‘Naturally we’re tracking them both with a small flotilla of drones and crewed craft, just like before. Under orders, for now, not to try anything provocative, although we’re still attempting to send messages.’ He grunted, sceptically. ‘Even now, trying to initiate a contact. And, just as before, we can’t detect any trace of the motive power used – no exhaust emissions, no waste heat, nothing. It will presumably take them months to get anywhere. At least that gives us time to plan.
‘But this time, unlike before, already they’re doing harm. Here’s what else we’ve been observing.’ He tapped the tabletop.
The Cache appeared in mid-air, a neat cube. Harry ran a short sequence showing the Cache opening up, displaying the kind of lesions that had allowed Grantt and Poole to enter the great artefact before. Now, though, there were more lesions, many more, through which Probes emerged. More diamond cannonballs, of a range of sizes.
Harry paused, stretching the silence.
Poole glanced around the room. He was met by uncomfortable stares, of curiosity, perhaps hostility. Formally he had no specific role to play and would not speak unless called, but evidently he was a familiar face. And in turn he knew most of the people here, by name and reputation if not personally. He could tell immediately that the key players were Harry himself, and Shamiso Emry, Nicola’s mother, the leading voice of caution. Gea, meanwhile, was formally nothing more than the first speaker – but Poole knew not to underestimate a mind as supple and resilient as that of the ancient machine consciousness, whatever formal role she played.
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 23
