Proxima (45 page)

‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘Don’t call me sir, for God’s sake. And no more goodbyes?’

‘I feel like I already left.’

‘Yeah. Me too. Kind of unusual for twins to split up, isn’t it?’

‘We’re unusual twins. I’ll tell you about it some time.’ She grinned. ‘And I guess there will be plenty of time. And – Beth?’

He was trying to put out of his head his last encounter with Beth. Neither of them had been able to speak for crying. ‘The last thing I told her was my true name.’

Kalinski stared at him.

He glanced up. By the light of the ferocious sun, the last few techs were just visible past the edge of the closing lid. One of them got down to her knees and waved. Yuri waved back.

And then the lid closed, silent, heavy, and that was that; they were shut off. The light in here, provided by the glowing walls, roof, floor, was bright enough, yet dimmed compared to the glow
of the blocked-out sun.

Yuri glanced at Kalinski. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘I wonder if we made the jump already. I mean in space. You think we’re already on Per Ardua?’

‘Impossible to say,’ Kalinski said. ‘But my feeling is that we make the transfer in the central bridging room, not these antechambers. It was in the central room you said you
experienced a gravity shift.’

‘Maybe. Who knows? Are you ready?’

‘Sure.’

They had actually worked through the transition process in virtual simulations, real space-programme stuff. You just pressed your hands into the indentations in the inner doorways. Nobody knew
if gloved hands would work, or if, as the indentations came in sets of three on each door, one or two or three people would be necessary to work them.

In the event, two pairs of hands seemed to work just fine. The door swung back.

Just another door, opening ahead of you, Yuri. Just another door, in a long line of doors.

They climbed through easily into the central chamber, and faced the second door, complete with its set of hand marks. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and lifted their hands. The door
behind them swung closed.

And when they opened the door before them Yuri immediately stumbled, under heavier gravity. Per Ardua gravity. Was he already back? Had another four years already passed? If so, Beth was
gone.

When he walked out of the middle chamber and climbed through the second hatch, Yuri found himself back in the Per Ardua chamber he remembered. The lid was closed; he couldn’t see the sky.
But there was the builder map on the wall, at which Kalinski stared avidly. There was the ladder from Tollemache’s rover, presumably having stood here for more than eight years. There was
even scattered mud on the floor, brought in from the surface by their boots, long dried. ‘Like I’ve never been away,’ he said.

Kalinski leaned with one gloved hand on a wall. Yuri knew she’d been training to cope with Per Ardua’s full Earth-type gravity, but it was going to be hard for a while.
‘I’m relieved it worked. I thought it would, but—’

‘I know. At least we’ve not been dropped in the heart of a sun, or something. I don’t think it works that way, this link system. It all seems too – sensible – for
that, doesn’t it? Look, we’re not going to need these suits. What say we dump them?’

‘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.

2202

F
ive 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, although 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.