Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘My mission was surveillance—’

  ‘Ancient history. Wouldn’t be right to send you home, would it, without you serving your time? That’s the thinking.’

  Yuri could see the muscles in Liu’s arms clench. Yuri said, ‘Liu. Listen to what he’s saying. What are you offering us, Freddie?’

  ‘Time for you to get him out of here. I fixed the security, you’ll be able to get away from the Hub, you won’t be stopped.’ He glanced around, faintly nervous. ‘You understand I had to bring you all the way in here to tell you this. It’s the only place I could be sure we wouldn’t be overheard. Ha! Right in the heart of the complex. Take him as far from here as you can.’

  Stef asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘For my mother, believe it or not. She was a loser. But I know she thought well of you, Liu Tao. You’re an honorary uncle,’ he said with disgust. ‘This is what you get. One favour. Now get him out, Yuri, before I change my mind.’

  They had to drag Liu away.

  The rover rolled past the quarantine camps, following the road’s steadily downward incline, heading out from the Hub.

  Liu was too angry, too distressed to speak.

  Yuri gave him some privacy by sitting up front with Stef. ‘So,’ he said. ‘We need to hide an angry Chinese from the Peacekeepers. Any ideas?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, unhesitating.

  He laughed. ‘I should have known.’

  ‘We get out of here with him ourselves. We go on an expedition. To another unique location, on Per Ardua, this world of mysteries and puzzles.’

  He was baffled. ‘Where the hell?’

  She glanced up at Proxima, directly above, its flare-scarred face shielded by scattered cloud. ‘As far from this place, this government-controlled substellar point, as it’s possible to get.’

  CHAPTER 71

  Once again Penny Kalinski was flown into the small Parisian airport at Bagneux.

  Penny climbed stiffly down from the small plane. Out on the tarmac in the middle of the day it was ferociously hot, even this early in the year. She glanced up at a sky washed out with sunlight. The Splinter was not visible just now, even though, like most of humanity, she knew exactly where to look for it, and knew exactly when it was due to arrive. That big damn rock was on its way. The best predictions were that it would miss the Earth, just, at the conclusion of a countdown that had begun eleven years ago when she’d been at that chaotic resources conference on Ceres, a count that had dwindled down to months, weeks, days – and now, at last, hours. But predictions were just that: predictions, best guesses. Nobody knew what was going to fall out of the sky. And now it was almost here.

  Penny had begun to think of the time left in terms of sleeps. Not that, in her late sixties, she slept all that well anyhow. Now, she suspected, she would not sleep again, not before the count ran down.

  A large automated car drew up to meet her. Sir Michael King was in the back, with a couple of UEI security goons, one male, one female – and, she was startled to see, Jiang Youwei, her one-time guide on Chinese Mars and Ceres.

  King and Jiang climbed out, King awkwardly and with the aid of a stick. King shook Penny’s hand. ‘Thanks for coming.’ His expression was grim, relieved only by the most fleeting of smiles.

  Jiang, however, tentatively embraced her. He looked so much older too, more gaunt, older than his forty years – but in his case that might be more to do with the harsh pressure of a full Earth gravity on a frame conditioned to the comparative gentleness of Mars. When he moved, in fact, she heard a subtle whir of exoskeletal support about his body.

  ‘It’s good to see you, old friend,’ she said to him now. ‘But kind of surprising.’ She pointed at the sky. ‘Given the huge geopolitical boot that is about to stamp on Earth.’

  Jiang shrugged. ‘I am here for you, Penelope Kalinski.’

  King raised his eyebrows. ‘Actually we’re all here because of Earth-shine, as usual. Look, shall we get back in the damn car? This heat is killing me.’

  They all clambered into the car, a bubble of glass and ceramic. The security goons took their places front and back, with King, Penny and Jiang in the middle. The car slid away silent as a soap bubble, heading north out of the airport. When Penny glanced back she saw the airport was empty of activity, not a plane in the sky, only a few craft sitting around on the apron and the terminal buildings lifeless.

  King seemed to have visibly aged since she’d last seen him. Despite, presumably, his ongoing courses of anti-senescence treatments. He was ninety-eight years old now. His Aussie accent seemed more pronounced as well – his tone was cruder, as if he could no longer be bothered to mask his true feelings behind conventional civility.

  But no doubt she had aged badly too. It was the stress, she supposed. The pressure. The disappointment. If you were anywhere near the centre of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which in an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws – territorialism, combativeness, a reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view – looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.

  King saw her looking out of the window. ‘Quiet, isn’t it? Everybody who can get out of the city, got. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Splinter does fall, despite everything the Chinese have said, then it won’t matter where the hell you are. But still, people have fled to the country, if they can.’

  ‘While here we are, rushing to the centre. Where are we headed, the Champs-Élysées again?’

  ‘Not that. Earthshine’s found himself a better hidey-hole. You’ll see.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ Jiang Youwei murmured. ‘I was born on Mars, as you know. I have seen too little of Earth, of the ancestral home of the human race.’

  King grunted. ‘Make the most of it. Last chance to see, eh?’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ Penny said.

  The Splinter – actually an immense chunk of the metallic core of some long-destroyed dwarf planet, a shattered sister of Ceres – was on a grazing trajectory; if left undisturbed it ought to skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere, and pass on more or less harmlessly. The UN’s tame astronomers and the defence agencies had determined this months ago, and the rock hadn’t significantly deviated since then. But the surface of the rock was covered with Chinese technology, from solar-cell arrays to emplacements of what looked suspiciously like their big Mars-terraforming bunker-buster bombs. Some observers even claimed they saw evidence of human activity, teams of taikonauts climbing around on the skin of the weaponised asteroid, even as it sailed in towards the Earth. Nobody in the West knew what the Chinese were up to.

  In ignorance, at least, Penny thought, there was still room for optimism, and she tried to express that.

  But King didn’t seem to think so. ‘Twenty-four hours out after years of a Cold War stand-off, with that damn thing barrelling in towards the planet – and given it’s won the Chinese damn few of the concessions they demanded – and you’re still hoping for the best, huh?’

  ‘What choice is there?’

  ‘To bury yourself in the deepest hole you can find – that’s the alternative. Which is exactly what Earthshine seems to be doing. And which is why we’re all here, invited to the show. He sees me as the most senior figure in UEI, which is kind of true, though many on my board and the major stockholders might not agree after all these years. A lot of water under the bridge. And he sees you as the queen of kernel science, which is what has caused us all this trouble in the first place. He’s trying to intervene in human affairs, the best way he can. And the only way he can do that is by working through humans. Specifically us.’

  Penny thought that over. ‘Could be he just thinks of us as friends, Sir Michael. He has known us a long time.’

  ‘And myself?’ Jiang asked softly.

  ‘He gets to as many Chinese as he can,’
King said bluntly. ‘In your case, through your relationship with Penny here. Your government and your security agencies are a lot more sceptical of the Core AIs than we are, in the UN countries. The Chinese see them as yet another relic of the capitalist, colonialist era that started with the Opium Wars and finished with the stunts of the Heroic Generation. Your people have long memories. So Chinese are harder to contact for the AIs.’

  Jiang shrugged. ‘I am hardly influential. And our peoples are not yet at war. I was, however, warned, by a French consul on Obelisk in fact, about the personal risk I was undertaking by coming here during the event. If there were to be some disastrous consequence—’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ King said frankly. ‘If the worst comes to the worst there probably won’t be a lamp post left standing for you to be strung up from.’ He laughed, and turned away to look out of the window once more.

  Penny saw that they were heading through central Paris now, travelling roughly north-east along a broad avenue. There was very little traffic, a few pedestrians, some in silvery capes, hats and goggles to fend off the ferocious sunlight. Through gaps between the clustered buildings she glimpsed the obvious landmarks, the Notre Dame cathedral up ahead, and the rusted ruin of the Eiffel Tower further in the distance off to the left, a gaunt iron frame rendered blue-grey by the dusty air. Save for the lack of traffic and the basic desertion by its inhabitants, she imagined Paris hadn’t changed much in the last century, or even the century before that; ancient ordinances against development had always preserved a certain look about the city. Paris was just Paris, unique.

  Jiang saw her looking. He smiled. ‘All this beauty will still be here this time tomorrow, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Nobody can be sure of any damn thing,’ King muttered. ‘Not even the Chinese, whatever they’re planning. They’re playing with huge energies, the energies of an interplanetary culture, and bringing them down to the Earth. Kind of irresponsible, even if it’s just to frighten us. I mean, one slip . . .’

  Gunshot. A sharp crack. Everybody in the car ducked, even the security goons.

  Everybody but King, who laughed. ‘Don’t sweat it. Just sound effects.’

  Penny raised her head cautiously. They were rolling across a bridge to the Île de la Cité; she saw the hulk of the cathedral off to her right, and that big old banyan tree dangling in the Seine that she remembered from her last visit. And she glimpsed people running over the bridge, in peculiar silvery suits speckled with pink dots. They looked to be carrying guns, or heavier weapons, bazookas. They ducked between patches of cover, fired their guns, ducked back, and again she heard the crack of weapons firing, presumably simulated.

  The car glided on smoothly through all this. The security guys looked embarrassed to have reacted.

  ‘Sound effects,’ King said again. ‘Background really, to fill out what the individual players are being fed.’

  ‘Players?’

  King pointed at the combatants in the silver suits. ‘Asgard. The latest craze. A game, or a series of games, set in the historic centres of the old cities. Those characters don’t see what you and I see. They are living in a virtual reconstruction of a Paris in 1945, when allied troops are moving in to lift the Nazi occupation of the city. The rules are strict, kind of. You’re allowed to get killed, once a day. The next morning you come back and you can run around and start fighting all over again.’

  Jiang was frowning. ‘My history is uncertain. Did the allies have to fight for Paris?’

  ‘No, not street to street. There was an agreement to protect the city; the Germans withdrew. It’s a game, a quasi-historical fantasy. There are similar games going on all over the world. There’s a major campaign going on in Londres to defend the city against a Nazi invasion, and that didn’t happen either. The most popular, I’m told, is the Battle of Stalingrad, that’s been running continuously for – well, I forget. And in America, the Civil War—’

  ‘I get the picture.’ Penny glanced up at the sky, looking for the Splinter. ‘This is how people spend their time, while that big rock comes sailing in towards the Earth? Isn’t it kind of decadent?’

  King shrugged. ‘Everything might end tomorrow. What else is there to do? You can’t blame them for escaping.’

  The car rolled on, heading north over another bridge, leaving the island behind. In the quasi-tropical sunlight of a post-Jolt Paris, more game players dashed across the road to hide in shadows, fighting out a non-existent war three centuries out of its time.

  CHAPTER 72

  The car pulled into a lot under the sprawling roof of the Gare du Nord, once one of the city’s main railway stations. Penny discovered that after various transport revolutions, the station had long been retired, turned into a museum, and ultimately converted into a somewhat ramshackle shopping area and living space, with lanes of apartments set out along what had once been platforms beside the rail tracks – and now even that had been abandoned. The station was a relic flattened under layers of history, even if that elderly nineteenth-century roof was still impressive.

  Today the old station seemed to be empty, Penny observed, as the security guys hurried them through from the car, looking around suspiciously. Everybody was hunkered down, in Paris as elsewhere, waiting for the show in the sky to come to its climax.

  They were led to a newer installation, tucked in one corner of what appeared to have once been the main station concourse. This was just a cube of what looked like smart concrete, a few metres to each side, inset with a massive steel door. There were no controls, no visible cameras, but when King stood before the door the steel plate slid down into the ground. Penny found herself looking into an elevator car, a brightly lit metal box. King looked back at the others, beckoned, and led the way in.

  There were no controls in the car, no markings on walls of metal broken only by a few strip lights, a handrail around the wall. When the door sealed up it was as if they had all been confined in some high-tech coffin. A subtle lurch told Penny that the car was dropping. There was no sound save for their own breathing, the soft rustling of their clothes. Penny, feeling very elderly, resisted grabbing the handrail.

  ‘If ever you suspected you had claustrophobia,’ King said with a slightly malicious smile, ‘this is where you find out.’

  Penny shrugged. ‘In spacecraft and dome colonies, that stuff gets beaten out of you.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ But King looked slightly nervous himself. When the descent slowed, he took a firm grip of the handrail. ‘You might want to grab on for the next part – you particularly, Jiang, if you’re not steady on your feet in this gravity.’

  They all followed his lead.

  There was another lurch. Now Penny could sense that the car was no longer dropping, but accelerating steadily forward. Still there was no noise, nothing but the abstract sense of motion. She said, ‘I feel like I’m in some Einstein thought experiment.’

  Jiang forced a smile. ‘Yes. I recall from high school. A person in an elevator car cannot distinguish between acceleration due to motion and acceleration due to gravity.’

  King growled, ‘Well, you’re in somebody’s thought experiment all right, but not Einstein’s. If only.’

  Jiang was standing slightly awkwardly, and Penny heard the creak of his exoskeletal support. ‘I think perhaps on the return journey I will request a chair to sit on.’

  ‘Good for you,’ King snapped. ‘If there is a return journey.’

  At last the car glided to a halt. The door slid down into a slot in the floor. Penny peered out, curious, at a chamber, a kind of tunnel, very wide, very tall, a curved roof panelled with fluorescents. She had an increasing sense of unreality, of detachment.

  And in the foreground there was Earthshine, in the guise in which she and Stef had first met him at Solstice, many years ago – or, according to Stef, her alone, in some lost timeline. He was tall, slim, dapper in a black, uncluttered business suit, with that engraved granite brooch in his lapel. With artfully greying hair he l
ooked about fifty. Ageless where the rest were ageing, but in reality far older than any of them.

  ‘Welcome to my latest underground lair,’ he said. He smiled, but his expression was complicated – distracted, Penny would have said. But she reminded herself that everything about the figure she saw was an artifice. He beckoned, and walked ahead. ‘Please – join me.’

  They stepped out of the cage, following him. Penny saw now that this tunnel, a wide circular bore, stretched off into the distance, dead straight; the walls, panelled with some kind of ceramic, curved over a smooth floor laid along the centre line of this big cylindrical volume, and heavy doors led off to side chambers. The central space was full of rows of white boxes, computers and other equipment. Small servo-robots moved everywhere, and Penny glimpsed human operators. The air was surprisingly cold, though that was a welcome change after the heat of a Parisian spring day, and there was a faint scent of ozone.

  Earthshine hurried them along, though Jiang and King struggled to make progress. ‘I’m sorry not to give you the guided tour. There have been developments . . .’

  ‘This is a computer-processing facility,’ Jiang Youwei said, looking around. ‘And an expensive one, by the look of it.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Earthshine gestured. ‘The floor divides the tunnel in two. Below there is a bay for power, cabling, and life-support systems. And above, memory store and processing capacity. This is an environment designed to survive alone without external support for an extended period. Just like a dome on your Chinese Mars, Jiang Youwei.’

  ‘This is you,’ Penny said. ‘This computer facility. You are stored here. We’re walking through your head!’

  Earthshine laughed – a distracted laugh, but a laugh. ‘It is difficult to be definitive; it is difficult to say what is “me”. Thanks to neutrino links my separated stores around the world are connected by lightspeed comms, but even so there are perceptible delays, a fraction of a second. As if parts of my head are slower to respond. But, yes, I intend this to be my primary node for the moment.’