Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  He thought that over. ‘No. It’s that argument that’s nebulous.’

  She laughed. ‘So what do you suggest?’

  Hesitantly, he said, ‘Suppose we did have a kid. Once it’s born it would have rights, yes? We could give it the right to choose whether to have more children with its siblings.’

  ‘Or its parents,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s part of the deal, and we have to face that.’

  ‘Only if we stick to this monster ISF plan. But there are other options.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It, he or she, could go off alone. Or we could walk away when we’re too old to work, instead of being a burden. We haven’t got to choose now.’

  ‘No. In fact we give the kid the choice.’

  ‘Right.’

  Mardina said, ‘I’ll tell you another possibility, Yuri. I know we argue about this. I’m still not convinced we really are stranded here, the way they told us . . .’

  Not this again, he thought.

  ‘I know there must have been a lot of briefings that were kept from me. But I keep thinking there must be some kind of monitoring of this situation. There has to be. And if it is all some kind of survival test—’

  ‘It’s a test we might pass once we have a kid?’

  ‘Something like that. It’s possible. It would show we are committed to this world, wouldn’t it? To this life. Maybe that’s all we need to demonstrate.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He tried to think that through. ‘But in that case, by having the kid, we’d be doing the opposite, wouldn’t we? That’s kind of paranoid thinking, Mardina.’

  She looked at him, in the green gloom. ‘But if we go ahead, for whatever reason, with whatever caveats in our heads – in the meantime, at least we’d have a kid.’

  He tried to imagine that. Tried to imagine a life without children, without other people, with only his and Mardina’s face, for ever. ‘We’re never going to get another chance, are we? Except for this way. Neither of us.’

  She sat back in silence.

  They were coming to a decision, he realised. Maybe if the ColU left them alone a bit more they’d have made this choice sooner.

  ‘One problem,’ she said now. ‘We’re not sleeping together.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Yuri said. ‘But I’m not sexually . . . inactive.’

  ‘I know. I hear you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah – ah – ah. Jerkin’ the gherkin. Come on, Yuri, it’s a quiet planet. Look, I do it too. But I don’t think about you when I’m doing it.’

  ‘Fine. Then we can sleep together. And you can carry on not thinking about me.’

  ‘You can bet on it.’ She looked at him, and they laughed again. She said, ‘Do you think we’ve both finally gone insane?’

  ‘Possibly. Probably . . .’

  There was a rustle from deeper back within the stromatolite’s bulk. The builders stirring, perhaps. Outside, the flare glow began to flicker, waning.

  CHAPTER 30

  2165

  When it began, it began suddenly.

  There was no choice to be made by Angelia as a whole, or by the near-million partials of which she was composed. The designers on Earth had built overrides into the probe’s governing software to ensure that. Selected by numbers produced by some automated sequencer, in their thousands and tens of thousands, sisters who had been together a decade were ripped out of the community and hurled off into the dark. Once out there they had no choice but to spread and turn and rebuild themselves as lenses and focus their light on the remaining core, rebuilt in its turn as an optical light mirror.

  Angelia 5941, still embedded deep in her family, felt the sudden lurch of the deceleration, saw with distributed senses the blaze of Proxima light reflected by the mass of castaways.

  Still she continued her helpless prayer. Not me. I have come this far. Let me be the one in a million who survives; let the others die before me. Why not me? It must be one of us . . .

  But prayer was futile.

  The casting-out was instant, brutal. It was as if she had been torn from another mould, and flung into space. Suddenly she was surrounded by a great crowd of sisters, she was one in a great fall of snowflakes, each of them shining by the light of Proxima. And there in the centre of it all was the core ship, blazing bright with reflected light, but with more sisters being hurled off its face even as she watched. There was no way to communicate with the core, or with her castaway sisters, or even with distant Earth, not any more; she was alone now, alone for ever. She saw all this in an instant.

  Then her own huge velocity flung her away from the core, out into the dispersing crowd, which scattered all around her like fragments from some tremendous explosion.

  THREE

  CHAPTER 31

  2173

  Stef Kalinski was summoned to Earth. Specifically to the office of Sir Michael King, at the corporate headquarters of Universal Engineering, Inc., in Solstice, Northwest Territories, United States of North America.

  Summoned. To be called peremptorily like this was galling.

  Major Stef Kalinski, twenty-nine years old, was now a full professor at her home institution in Vancouver, and also an officer in the International Space Fleet. She had worked hard to get here. Attaining a rank in the ISF had been a pain in the butt, and, in order to pursue parallel careers since the age of twenty-one, she had had to forgo such luxuries as a personal life. But the ISF had been the only route by which she could get an assignment to the one laboratory where the most exotic physics known to mankind was being pursued: the Wheeler Research Facility in Jules Verne, a farside crater on the moon, the only place in the solar system where you could get to properly study a kernel – unless you were allowed down to Mercury itself, which she wasn’t.

  Her strategy had paid off. She was pretty eminent now; you only had to look at her publication and citation record to see that. She liked to think that if her father was still alive he’d have been proud of her, even if she had ended up studying the very phenomenon which had ruined his own career – but he had died years before, in an open prison on the fringe of the desertified core of France.

  And now here was this ‘invitation’. The note she received even had a designated place and time, with attached clipper transit tickets, even before she’d agreed to go.

  But it was a summons from Sir Michael King himself. After decades at the top King was still the big cheese at UEI, which in turn was still the primary paymaster at Verne, a notionally UN-run establishment, thanks to the immense profits UEI had made from patenting kernel technologies. And, as some of her colleagues half-joked, behind King was said to be the shadowy figure of Earthshine, one of the tremendous artificial minds that had been running much of the planet for nearly a century. You didn’t mess with Earthshine, they joked. Or half-joked.

  Stef’s policy was to ignore such chatter and try to focus on what she wanted. At eleven years old, she had been there on the very day when the International-One, UEI’s first hulk, had lumbered into space from the sun-blasted plains of Mercury. Now those mighty kernel-driven ships criss-crossed the solar system, and had even set off for the stars. But she wasn’t allowed on Mercury, where the kernels were. Because of tensions with the Chinese, who still had no access to kernel technology, security around the kernel mines was ferociously tight, too tight for her. If this was a door opening a crack, a chance to get closer to the kernels, not just the tame handful that UEI had allowed to be shipped to the moon – well, she had to take it.

  So she packed a bag.

  Leaving the moon on a rocketship was unspectacular.

  The UEI clipper’s crew squirted their thrusters to leave lunar orbit, and set off on an unpowered trajectory to Earth. Following a low-energy orbit, it would take Stef three days to fly from the moon to the Earth, just as it had been for Armstrong and Aldrin in Apollo 11 almost exactly two centuries before. And it was going to stay that way, even though mankind was now building ships powerful enough to reach the stars themselves.
The use of anything other than minimum-energy strategies in the Earth-moon system had been banned by international agreement. The fragility of Earth in the face of interplanetary energies had become obvious in the days of the Heroic Generation, when the first really large structures had begun to be assembled in orbit around the Earth. In a few cases geoengineering technology itself had actually been weaponised: droughts and floods, for instance, had been inflicted on enemy nations.

  At least the in-flight facilities were a little more advanced than in the Apollo days – including the sealed-off Love Nest at the rear of the main passenger cabin, which some of her fellow passengers used assiduously, and Stef ignored. She tried to work. And she spent long hours in the ship’s small gymnasium, using equipment adapted for microgravity, stressing her muscles against elasticised harnesses and shoving against a kind of robot sumo wrestler, preparing her body for Earth gravity after years at Verne, on the moon.

  With the three-day transit over, the clipper skimmed Earth’s atmosphere and blipped its retro-rockets to settle into a high-inclination orbit of the planet, from which it would descend to land at the young city of Solstice, in the Canadian far north. It was a routine manoeuvre; all Earth’s passenger spaceports were at high latitudes these days, because that was where the dominant cities were – though commercial and military cargoes were still launched from more energetically efficient but climatically challenging equatorial sites, like Kourou. And as the clipper looped over the Earth waiting for final clearance to land, the passengers were given a grandstand view of much of the planet’s surface.

  The face of Earth continued to evolve, following the huge shocks of the climate Jolts of the last century. At the coasts, much transformed thanks to the nibbling of sea-level rise, solar-power farms were spreading through the shallow waters of the flooded shores and river valleys, sprawling artificial meadows of gen-enged grasses supplying electricity grids through modified photosynthesis. This was part of a conscious global strategy to minimise the use of any energy source on the home planet save sunlight, because any other method meant an injection of additional heat to the world’s global balance.

  Meanwhile, across the continental interiors, as glaciers vanished, aquifers were exhausted and the rain just stopped, the mid-latitude regions had been largely abandoned. Looping over the arid plains of Amazonia, southern Europe, Asia, even much of the territory of the old United States, Stef saw few signs of modern humanity save huge solar-cell farms. Great old cities still glittered in the intense sunlight, but there was nobody moving in there but archaeologists and historians, workers for resource extraction companies, and a few extreme-experience tourists exploring lost cities that, to the rising generation, were already half legend: New Orleans, Saigon, Venice, even the nuked remains of Mumbai.

  The great population adjustments caused by the Jolts had all but run their course; the pandemics were over, the refugee flows had dwindled, and political alliances, even national boundaries, had been redrawn. Now new generations were growing up in brand-new cities set up in latitudes that would once have been seen as too extreme, in the very far north, and even the far south, on the coast of an increasingly ice-free Antarctica. Cities such as Solstice, near the shore of the Great Bear Lake, sitting precisely on the Arctic Circle in a northerly state of the new United States of North America into which Canada, with huge concessions from its suffering southern neighbour, had been absorbed.

  A city down towards which the lunar clipper now swept for its final descent.

  CHAPTER 32

  The UEI corporate headquarters on the outskirts of Solstice had a relatively modest profile, just glass-block architecture tipped south to face the low sun. Once she was escorted inside the building, however, Stef glimpsed extensions underground, showy staircases like something out of the Titanic leading down to sweeping underground concourses.

  Sir Michael King’s office was above ground, somewhere near the centre of the complex. The day was fine and bright, and the glass-walled offices were filled with the Arctic sun’s slanting light. Led by an aide, Stef was brought to a wide, airy room at whose very centre a single desk was set up overlooking some kind of pond, a smooth glassy surface that reflected the clear blue light of the sky. King himself sat behind the desk, she saw as she approached. In his late fifties now, heavy-set, his thick hair snow-white, King was famous and unmistakable. To one side another man sat, apparently relaxed, on an upright chair, a tall, slim, sober figure. They both had drinks on the desk before them.

  To reach the desk the aide led her across an ocean of rich blue pile carpet marked with the UEI logo. Stef walked stiffly, trying to mask the gravity heaviness, the fatigue. It didn’t help that she had to skirt that central pond. Its clear water contained fish, she saw as she passed, big carp by the look of them, sleek golden forms that swam around and around. There was nothing in the pond with them, no fronds or reeds. They were like a virtual abstraction, Stef thought.

  Both men stood as she approached, the visitor with a smooth, slightly unnatural grace, and Michael King heavily, his hands on the surface of the desk. He was wearing a kilt, she saw. The aide stood by, silent, discreet.

  ‘Major Kalinski,’ King said. He proffered his hand, which she shook.

  ‘Good to see you again, Sir Michael.’

  ‘Hell, just call me Michael. Everybody gets my titles confused since King Harold made me a thane. You know, I’m one of only three individuals to have been knighted both by the King of Angleterre at Versailles, and by King Harold of North Britain. And me an Aussie! But then they both lay claim to be head of state of what’s left of Australia . . . Do you like the kilt by the way? Wore it to my investiture in Edinburgh. So glad you’ve come. I do have another visitor, as you can see.’ He watched her closely now, as if anticipating her reaction. ‘Major Kalinski – meet Earthshine.’

  Earthshine.

  Stef, shocked by the unexpected introduction, reached out a hand, then withdrew it in confusion. ‘Sorry.’

  The Earthshine avatar smiled at her. Tall, solid, dressed in a sober suit and collarless shirt, it, he, looked like a handsome fifty-year-old of the political class. On his lapel he wore an odd brooch, a disc of granite carved with concentric grooves, a single slash to the centre. When he spoke his accent was soft British. ‘Please don’t apologise.’ He reached for the desk with two hands; he picked up his own glass – but his fingers passed through King’s tumbler, where they broke up briefly into a flickering cloud of pixels. ‘I do use programmable-matter android forms sometimes, but I much prefer the holographic form if the bandwidth is adequate. All depends on the circumstances, of course.’

  She tried not to stare. So the comedians back at Verne had been right, more than they knew. She realised that she had no idea what cavernous thought processes were going on behind this smiling-politician-type facade. Why was Earthshine here? Why was she here?

  King said, ‘Major, as you just experienced, Earthshine isn’t really here with us at all. In as much as he’s anywhere, he’s down in a vast computer complex under Fort Chipewyan, right in the heart of the Canadian shield and as stable a geological site as you’ll find. Snug in his bunker, with layers of replicators building new components for him from raw rock, and feeding off Earth’s inner heat. And with multiple backups across the continent . . .’

  ‘Whereas you, Michael, live so modestly, here in your glass Versailles.’

  King laughed easily. ‘Well, I’m not some silicon demigod like you. But I’m a salesman, and I have to impress the punters and the investors. Sit down, both of you, please. Do you like the fish, by the way, Major Kalinski?’

  ‘Are they artificial? Some kind of robot—’

  ‘No, no. But they’ve been gen-enged to photosynthesise. They need nothing but light, and some dissolved nutrients in the water, to survive. A new UEI initiative, photosynthesising animals, a new way to make more efficient use of the sunlight. Have to be careful about the post-Heroic protection laws, of course. The pond’s an extreme environme
nt for them, but it makes a striking demonstration of their nature, don’t you think?’

  ‘It must be a little boring for them. The fish.’

  He rubbed his chin. ‘Well, maybe. Hadn’t thought of that. Not much for them to do all day, swimming around in their little tank. Just like you, eh, Earthshine? I ought to do something for them, though, you’re right, Major. Maybe put in one of those little treasure chests. Make a note, Briggs.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh – where are my manners? Major, would you like a drink? I laid on a treat for you. Briggs?’

  The aide raised a kind of wand, and a section of the desk opened. A tray rose up bearing a selection of sodas, many in antique-looking classic-design cans, presumably not made of aluminium.

  Stef shook her head. ‘Oh, not for me, thanks.’

  King looked crestfallen.

  Earthshine said smoothly, ‘I think you should force yourself, Major. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this.’

  ‘It’s true,’ King said. ‘I remember on Mercury how you said the soda was always flat. Now you’re stuck on the moon and I guess it’s the same up there, right? I never did get around to researching a fix. I figured that if I dragged you all the way back to Earth, the least I could do—’

  ‘I appreciate you remembering, after all this time.’

  ‘I told you then, didn’t I? People are everything in this life. Contacts. You have to cultivate them. Remember the names of their puppies—’