Saul searched her eyes as he took it from her. ‘Why in God’s name would you need something like this on board a tourist craft?’ he asked. ‘You could have blown a hole in the lander and killed all of us, not just Mitchell.’
‘It’s an insurance policy.’
‘Insurance against what?’
An uncomfortable look crossed her face. ‘Against getting caught.’
‘You were smuggling, is that it?’
‘Not necessarily in this bird. In the VASIMRs, mostly. Things got tight a few years back, and we were on the verge of going under. This way, we can slip all kinds of stuff past customs and fly it straight back home without going anywhere near Florida. People, sometimes, too.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess telling you this doesn’t matter now.’
‘So what were you planning on doing, if you got caught? Have a shoot-out with the ASI?’
Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’
Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.
‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’
She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’
‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’
She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No.’ Her expression was stony. ‘Go find him now, before he gets away.’
Lunar Array, 11 February 2235
Saul pocketed some extra ammunit
ion that Amy gave him, her mouth pursed all the while in a thin line. By the time she had depressurized the lander again, Mitchell had already gained half an hour’s head-start.
‘You’re better equipped than he is,’ Amy pointed out, over the A/V, after he mentioned this. ‘Remember, you’re carrying a full air supply in your backpack, while he jumped out with just his suit’s inbuilt emergency supply. He’s not going to waste time doing anything but heading straight for the Array. Besides,’ she added, her voice crackling slightly, ‘it’s not like you’re going to have too much trouble following his trail.’
Saul pulled himself through the tiny hatch and then down a narrow ladder, a plume of dust rising around his weighted boots as he touched down. He looked back up at the lander, shocked at how tiny, frail and primitive-looking it seemed, and gave Amy a wave just as she swung the hatch shut again.
He looked around and saw that the lander stood on a wide shelf of rock, only a few kilometres from the edge of Copernicus Crater. Hills ringed the crater’s rim, and he could spot part of the city, where it lay further around the crater in the narrow gap between two peaks. The city itself spilled down the wide, terrace-like steps of the crater’s inner wall, its tallest buildings reaching upwards like pale spears that had been thrust into the regolith. The snaking lines of pylons that carried trains back and forth between the city and the Array were as yet invisible from Saul’s vantage.
Mitchell’s footprints stood out clear and sharp in the dust, and Saul followed them along the lunar surface, in long strides that would have been impossible back on Earth. He looked ahead and saw t that the ed straight to the rim of hills, a few kilometres away. He breathed evenly as he ran, pacing himself and keeping his eye out for any loose rocks that might trip him. He recalled reading somewhere that the close proximity of the lunar horizon made it hard to judge distances.
‘Mitchell!’ he yelled over the A/V. ‘Can you hear me? Mitchell!’
No answer.
The most economical way to run on the Moon, he knew from previous visits to Copernicus, was a kind of lope that fell just shy of skipping. It exhausted him all the same, so that when he came to a halt, about halfway towards the hills, the inside of his suit already reeked of stale sweat. The terrain had meanwhile taken on a different texture, the regolith giving way to ripples of ancient lava and boulders left over from the time when part of the crater wall had collapsed, aeons before. This made it a lot harder to pick out Mitchell’s footsteps.
‘I just want to know what the hell’s going on,’ Saul shouted again over the A/V. ‘You owe me that much.’
‘Do I?’ came the unexpected reply.
Saul straightened up, still panting from his exertions, and stared over towards the hills. If Mitchell was there somewhere, he couldn’t see him. He tried zooming in with his contacts, but there was so much debris scattered everywhere, it would be easy for Mitchell to hide himself amongst it.
‘I know there’s some connection between you and those artefacts,’ Saul gasped. ‘Olivia found the proof: this all started when they brought you back from Site 17.’
‘What’s happening now,’ said Mitchell, ‘is too important to let you, or anyone else, interfere.’
Saul could tell from the sound of the man’s breathing that he had also been running. So he started moving again and, after another few minutes of steady progress, he spotted movement amongst the deep shadows cast over the base of one of the hills. He squinted intently, till one of those shadows resolved itself into a tunnel mouth cut into the side of a hill. Saul stopped, exhausted, and sucked water through a straw located inside his helmet.
He looked around and saw he had come to the edge of an old construction road. Rubble was piled into mounds by the roadside, while several abandoned-looking construction vehicles and a broken-down mobile foundry stood nearby, stark and black against the stars. He started running again, gradually picking up his pace.
‘You were never actually going to help me shut down the Array, were you?’
‘I should have killed you first, instead of Lester,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I can see that now: my stupid mistake. I had to find some way to stop you interfering. But I couldn’t take a chance on Lester and Amy sending out a distress signal, if I went for you first. But I screwed up, didn’t I?’
‘What’s too important f me to interfere in?’
Mitchell just laughed. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘Would it make you turn back? See things my way?’
There had developed a subtle change in the tone of Mitchell’s voice. There was a touch of echo to it, as if he were no longer wearing his helmet. Saul searched for local networks, and came across a public map of the area that included the locations of several emergency access entrances just inside the mouth of that tunnel. It now yawned ahead of him, just a hundred metres or so away.
‘I said try me.’
‘I’m trying to save the human race,’ replied Mitchell. ‘Is that good enough?’
Saul nearly stopped dead in his tracks. ‘What?’
‘Some of the Founder species wanted to destroy the network, because they came to realize that, once they’d created a wormhole leading into the very far future, as a result time between the two mouths became fixed, immutable. Do you understand?’
Saul saw he was now very nearly at the tunnel entrance. He’d hoped that, if he could just keep Mitchell talking, he had a better chance of catching up. But his muscles were starting to protest, and Mitchell meanwhile sounded like he hadn’t done anything more strenuous than take a short jog.
‘That doesn’t make one damn bit of sense to me,’ Saul gasped.
‘You’ve heard of the observer effect in physics, right? Once you observe an event, an infinite range of possible outcomes collapses to just one. It’s the same with time. Whenever you create a wormhole, and move one mouth through space at relativistic speeds, you create a path into the future – but the objective time that passes
outside
the wormhole becomes fixed into a single, unchangeable destiny. Do you see? It’s the death of free will. That’s why the Founders fought each other for control of the networks. Some of the artefacts we found had been weapons in that war.’
Saul finally reached the mouth of the tunnel, his lungs burning from overexertion. He knew he had to keep going but, in truth, he wasn’t sure he could. He glanced back the way he’d come, but by now the lander was lost amidst the boulders and dust.
‘The growths?’ he panted, his back resting against the tunnel wall. ‘They were one of those weapons?’
Mitchell laughed. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. The growths aren’t trying to kill us,’ he said. ‘They’re
saving
us.’
Saul pushed himself away from the wall, and headed further into the tunnel until he came to a door. ‘Tell me how the growths are saving us,’ he asked, still stalling for time.
‘You think they’re killing people,’ said Mitchell, ‘but they’re not. They’re preserving them.’
A UP-enabled menu sprang up in front of the door, just as Saul stepped closer. The interface was primitive, a set of simple textual menus displayed in lines of bright-green text hovering in the blackness before him.
‘
Preserving
them?’
A light blinked on above the same door, and it swung slowly open. Saul took a step back, suddenly afraid of Mitchell lunging out at him – but there was no one there. He stepped inside and found himself standing by the top of a ladder set into an unpressurized shaft that fell away into darkness. He lowered himself over the edge and began to descend, his suit’s shallow lights illuminating the shaft walls around him. It felt too much like descending into some bottomless pit.
‘Our lives are meaningless without free will,’ Mitchell continued. ‘The wormholes’ very existence reduces us to automatons following predestined paths. The growths are incredible, Saul; they copy everything, all the way down to the superposition of every particle in the bodies of every living organism on Earth. Every living human being is going to wake up as if nothing happened – but way, way up the time-stream. They’ll find themselves in a place that looks just like Earth, but they’ll be truly free for the first time in their lives. It would be wrong not to let the growths preserve everyone, Saul. I mean
everyone
.’
‘You want the same thing to happen to the colonies?’
‘Of course,’ Mitchell replied, sounding surprised as if the answer were self-evident. ‘The pools showed me everything: a grand strategy, to recover sentient life from all through the period of the universe fixed by the wormhole networks, and rebirth it in the deep, deep future, at a point when the wormholes no longer exist. They showed me glimpses of it, Saul. It’s beautiful – and we can all be a part of it. But if you shut the Array down, you’re dooming the colonies to a living death. That’s why I had to stop you any way I could, because I knew you would never understand. Not if you hadn’t seen what I’ve seen.’
Saul paused, letting his helmet rest gently against a rung. He felt like he couldn’t move an inch further, but he had no idea just how far down the shaft went. He forced himself to start moving again, tightly clenching his jaw, and stopped only when a black wave of dizziness threatened to suck him into unconsciousness. He then thrust his elbows through the bars of the ladder to support him, and waited until it passed.
He finally reached the bottom a few minutes later, his suit lights showing polished rock walls. Saul slumped down on the floor and waited for the agony in his muscles to pass. A new menu appeared, listing the location of emergency air supplies.
‘Mitchell? Whatever those pools told you, did it ever occur to you that maybe they were feeding you lies? How can you know that any of what they told you is really true?’
Silence.
Saul staggered back upright and headed, as quickly as he was capable, down a long, low-ceilinged corridor that forced him to hunch over. He soon left the shaft behind, whereupon his universe shrank to encompass only the bubble of light projected by his suit and the sound of his own laboured breathing. The muscles in his legs threatened to cramp up once more and, when he sucked at the water pipe inside his helmet, a warning flashed up that he’d already used up most of it.
Just when Saul started seriously considering turning back, he noticed a certain greying of the surrounding darkness.
He pushed on and a dim light grew until he could see where the corridor ended at another ladder, extending downwards into brightness. He halted there and peered down, noting that this second shaft was nowhere near as deep as the previous one. He could just make out a door no more than thirty metres down, and he descended quickly towards it.
It proved to be part of an airlock complex, which he stepped through, cycling the atmosphere and pulling his helmet off once the pressure had equalized. The air tasted cool, and sweeter than it had any right to.
He thought of Amy, almost certainly still grieving for Lester, back there in the lander.
Got to move
. He stripped his suit off, abandoning it on the floor of the airlock. He next pulled his own clothes out of a backpack slung beneath his air supply, and changed into them quickly.