Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I guess we could. There are no sim controllers to order us around now, are there?’

  ‘Welcome to my world, Colonel Kalinski.’

  They got out of their suits quickly; they were self-operating, self-opening. Underneath they both wore light, practical coveralls in Arduan pastel colours, and they had backpacks of survival gear and science monitors.

  Yuri nodded at Kalinski, hefted his pack, and made his way up the ladder to the closed hatch lid. Braced on a rung, he pressed both hands into indentations in the lid – indentations which, he recalled, had not been there the last time he passed through, and the builder marks seemed to have vanished.

  To his relief, the hatch opened smoothly.

  He looked up at a dismal cloud-choked grey sky framed by dead-looking trees, and it was cold, he could feel it immediately, cutting through his thin coverall. He’d been gone for eight years, he reminded himself, four years as some kind of disembodied signal passing from Ardua to Mercury, and four years coming back again – even if it only felt like a month to him. Plenty of time for things to change.

  He clambered out quickly, and stood on the Arduan ground once more. He watched Kalinski follow cautiously, slowly given the burden of the higher gravity, but her face was full of wonder, or astonishment. Her first moments on an alien world.

  Standing together, they turned around. Much had indeed changed. The thick Hub forest still stood, but dead leaves hung limply from the stubby upper stem branches, the undergrowth had died back, and there was a huddle of dead builders, not a purposefully constructed midden but just a heap of corpses, on which, Yuri saw, frost had gathered. Frost, at the substellar. His breath fogged.

  ‘Hello, Yuri Eden.’

  Yuri turned. There was the ColU, its dome smeared with some kind of ash, its upper surfaces rimed with frost. Yuri felt oddly touched. ‘You waited for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For eight years? Jesus. Looks like you stayed in the very same spot.’

  ‘No. That would have been foolish. I moved periodically in order to ensure the smooth functioning of my drive mechanisms and—’

  ‘All right, I get it. This is Stef Kalinski. Colonel in the ISF.’

  ‘I know of you. Welcome, Colonel Kalinski.’

  Kalinski just stared.

  ‘Yuri Eden, you left Mercury four years ago. We received warning of your coming a short time ago, you and your companion.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kalinski. ‘The message beat us, just as when you came through the other way, Yuri. The transit’s not quite lightspeed.’

  ‘The message was received by Captain Jacob Keller in the hull, who informed me.’

  Yuri asked, ‘Keller? What about Brady?’

  ‘He has not survived. We keep each other company, Captain Jacob Keller and I. Sometimes we play poker.’

  Yuri had to laugh. ‘Poker. My God. ColU, the weather – what happened here?’

  ‘Volcanism, Yuri Eden. It seems that a major volcanic episode has occurred, probably in the northern region, from which we fled with the jilla and the builders.’

  ‘Ah. All that uplifting.’

  ‘Yes. It is not an uncommon occurrence on this world, it seems. That is, not uncommon on a geological timescale.’

  ‘And now,’ Kalinski said, ‘we’re in some kind of volcanic winter.’

  ‘No doubt for the native life forms it is part of the natural cycle. A spur to evolution perhaps. But the humans here have suffered. Of course the star winter was already a challenge. All this has happened in the interval while you fled, dreamless, between the stars.’

  ‘My God. If it’s as bad as this here, at the substellar . . . Where are they, Delga and the rest?’

  ‘Gone from here, Yuri Eden.’

  Yuri glanced around, at this utterly transformed wreck of a world, to which he had now been exiled by the mother of his child, as once he had been exiled to the future by his parents. He felt his heart harden, as he stood there in the unexpected cold. ‘OK. Well, there are big changes on the way, ColU. Floods of immigrants are going to be coming through that Hatch. I don’t imagine the UN will wait the eight years it will take for our bad news about the volcanic winter to reach them, for that process to start.’

  ‘Or even,’ Kalinski said, ‘for confirmation that the Hatch is actually two-way, that it’s safe to pass through. I know Michael King.’

  ‘We must help them,’ the ColU said.

  ‘Yeah. But we’ll be in charge,’ Yuri said firmly. Kalinski looked at him strangely, but he ignored her. ‘ColU, let’s go to the hull, and get some warm clothing, and work out where to start.’

  ‘One thing, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I heard about the decisions made on Mercury. I’m sorry for your loss.’ It held out a bundle of dried-out stems. Mister Sticks.

  Yuri took the doll.

  Then the ColU whirred, turned, and rolled away along a track that was now well worn, trampled down by eight years of use. Yuri followed briskly, carefully carrying the beat-up little doll.

  SIX

  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, altho
ugh 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 Earth
shine. ‘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.