Proxima (59 page)

On the long, mostly empty highway, the cars cruised on quietly, calmly, in their straight lines, their onboard AIs taking over the controls from drivers who threshed and
screamed, tearing at sightless eyes. Until the radiation began to fry their electronics, and they slewed aside.

This was only the beginning. The particle storm, travelling slower than light, would not arrive for another two hours.

E
arthshine’s bunker remained calm, the staff working at their monitors and slates, recording, analysing, as the bad news from the sky filled
the screens. Sir Michael King, walking stiffly with the aid of his stick, went around the staff individually, to reassure them that they were free to take a break, to try to contact family on the
surface if they needed to. Most of them stayed where they were, as if by keeping on working, sticking to the routine, they were somehow holding the greater horror at bay.

Now the screens showed a darkening, a thickening smog, cutting off the unbearable brilliance of the sky.

King stormed into Earthshine’s central sanctum. ‘So what now? We had the flash – what next?’

‘Massive particles,’ said Earthshine – or at least the semi-transparent partial copy the primary had left behind when he fled on the
Tatania
. ‘The ozone layer is
already gone. Ultraviolet and gamma rays are battering the surface of the Earth. As for life, basic cellular functions are being compromised.’ The virtual looked thoughtful. ‘People are
being
cooked
. Animals too. And now the cosmic ray storm. The last surviving satellites, shielded by Earth’s shadow from the flash, told us that much. The high-energy particles will
be knocking atmospheric molecules apart, oxygen, nitrogen, to produce nitrogen dioxide. Some of which will combine with rain to produce nitric acid, acid rain, while the rest lingers in the air to
block out the sunlight which—’

‘It’s an extinction event,’ King breathed.

‘Indeed. As if a gamma-ray burster had gone off in the heart of the solar system.’

‘And the people?’

‘The flash will have the most immediate effect. The radiation will kick in soon; cancers will take most of the survivors of the short-term cull.’

‘Cull? What the hell kind of a word is that? And you, you bastards? You Core AIs?’

‘Oh, we will survive in our deep shelters. I certainly in my central bunker, with this store as a primary backup, and the partial I sent offworld with Penny Kalinski as a
secondary.’

‘And then what?’

Earthshine shrugged. ‘A new domain of life will eventually populate the Earth. Perhaps we will have some influence on the future. Not myself, of course. I have fled . . .’

‘I feel like hurting you.’

‘It’s not my fault. We tried to broker peace through the Council of Worlds. Yet I understand how you feel.’

‘Then whose fault is it? Ours, the Chinese?’

‘Maybe neither. Some reports have emerged about the beginnings of this, at Mars, at Ceres. Although I doubt if any historians will survive to piece together a full account. I am uploading
what I can to my partial twins in the deep store and on the
Tatania . . .
’

‘Some bastard pulled the trigger, right? That’s what it boils down to. Without waiting the few minutes it would have taken to get confirmation from Earth. Christ. That was always the
fear in the first Cold War, you know. That a commander of some nuclear sub, out of touch with his government, would take matters into his own hands.’

‘But even now the events that followed are uncertain. There have been fragmentary reports of mutinies on the Nail itself, by captive UN crew, and counter-mutinies by the Chinese, even as
it fell towards Mercury. There may have been no control, in the end; as it came plummeting in for the strike the Nail was a war zone itself. There was nobody in a position to deflect it, even if
the order had come to do so. How appropriate, that the end should come this way. A war nobody wanted, and thought would be kept at bay by sentimentality. A war triggered, not by any single command,
but by foolishness, arrogance, and poor communication.’

He spoke blandly, not judgementally, King thought; lacking processing power, lacking definition, he was smooth-faced, static, unconvincing.

Suddenly King realised he was alone in here. Quite alone. Talking to nobody. He headed for the door. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

B
y the time the Nail struck Mercury the
Tatania
had already been travelling for three days. She had headed straight out from the
Earth-moon system, away from the sun, and was more than three times as far from the sun as the Earth, when Beth picked up a fragmentary message from her mother.

‘
I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favour. Wherever you end up I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll
always—
’

And then, immediately after, the flash, dazzling bright, from the heart of the solar system. The bridge was flooded with light.

Beth saw them react. Lex McGregor, in his captain’s chair, straightening his already erect back. Penny Kalinski grabbing Jiang’s hands in both her own. Earthshine, the creepy virtual
persona, seeming to freeze. They all seemed to know what had happened, the significance of the flash.

All save Beth.

‘What?’ Beth snapped. ‘What is it? What happened?’

Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people. ‘They have unleashed
the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now,
this.
’

‘
They
being . . .’

‘The Hatch builders. Who else?’

‘And you, you aren’t human. You say
we.
You have no right to say that.’

The virtual looked at her mournfully. ‘I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.’

And she stared at him, shocked to the core by the name.

Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. ‘So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?’

‘I think so.’

‘What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?’

Penny seemed to think it over. ‘There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light.
They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.’

‘OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?’

‘Might be a good idea.’

Beth didn’t understand any of this. ‘And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?’

Penny looked back at her. ‘Life will recover, ultimately. But for now . . .’

Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

2217

O
n the day side of Per Ardua, the stars were invisible, save for Proxima itself, and the glorious twin primary suns of Alpha Centauri. But those
who had followed Yuri and Liu and Stef in the exploration of the dark side, in the years following their pioneering trek, had rediscovered the night sky. A whole new generation had to be taught the
constellations.

A distance of four light years wasn’t much on the scale of the volume of space that contained the thousands of stars visible to the human eye; the sky of Per Ardua’s endless night
was pretty much like that seen from Earth, and save for the brilliance of the nearby Alpha stars the constellations were mostly very similar. Just as on Earth, Cassiopeia was a particular
favourite, its W-shape easy to pick out. But as seen from Per Ardua, there was the addition of one dim star to that constellation. That pendant to the W was Sol, the nearest star to Proxima save
for the Alphas, a grain of light that had been the site of all human history before the first missions to Proxima. Parents pointed this out to their children.

A little more than four years after the war, Sol flared so brightly that it was, briefly, visible even from the day side of Per Ardua.

S
tef looked at Yuri. ‘A gravity shift. Just like the Hatches on Mercury and Per Ardua. So we’re already there. Wherever
there
is. And in the outside universe more time has passed. Years, maybe, or—’

‘Or centuries.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Shall we?’

There was no ladder in the final chamber, but the closed lid above bore a hand-imprint key. Yuri boosted Stef up on his shoulders so she could work the key. As she fumbled, he grunted.
‘Get on with it, woman.’

‘Look at us. Two old idiots, exploring interstellar space.’

‘But we’re here.’

‘That we are.’

At last the lid swung back. There was a faint pop of equalising pressure. They found themselves looking up at a blue, apparently harmless sky – and the air that rushed in, full of odd
smells, was maybe a bit thin and cold, but healthy, oxygen-rich air, undoubtedly. Yuri deliberately kept breathing. They had no stored oxygen; there was no point holding their breath. But he felt
no ill effects.

Stef clambered out of the pit, then reached down to help Yuri scramble up. Once again they had some trouble. It was a comedy, Yuri thought, two old stiffs climbing out of a hole in the ground.
At last he was out, and they looked at each other, laughed.

Then they stood together and faced a new world.

They were on high ground here, which sloped away to a plain streaked with purple and white, on which stood a scatter of slim orange cones, vegetation perhaps. To the right the ground rose up to
a rocky massif – no, it was too regular to be natural, Yuri realised slowly. It was some kind of tremendous
building
, a sloping face with deep grooved inlets. On the horizon he saw
more mountains, mist-shrouded, that again looked suspiciously regular, like tremendous pyramids.

A sun dominated the sky, huge, hanging low, its face pocked with dark spots.

‘Wow,’ said Stef simply.

Yuri dug out his elderly ISF-issue slate, which had a wireless link to the ColU’s processor box, in his chest pack. ‘Can you see all this, old buddy?’

A single green light sparked on the slate.

‘So, any idea where we are?’

‘None at all,’ Stef said. She pointed at the main sun. ‘
That
looks like another Proxima, another M dwarf. But the Galaxy is full of M dwarfs. We could be anywhere . .
.’

A huge shadow swept over the ground to their left. Yuri looked up.

‘I guess we should start walking,’ Stef said, still staring ahead. She hadn’t noticed the shadow, evidently. ‘If we manage to see any stars we might reconstruct a
constellation pattern, figure out where we are. I have the 3D positions of the nearby stars loaded on my slate.’

‘Or,’ Yuri said, ‘we could just ask.’ He pointed upwards.

At last she turned to see.

Over their heads, a craft was descending, coming in to land.

It was like a tremendous airship. It moved smoothly, silently. It bore a symbol on its outer envelope, crossed axes with a Christian cross in the background, and lettering above:

Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as they watched, astonished, a
hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.

As soon as he reached the ground the man started towards them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up
boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.

Yuri called, ‘Who the hell are you?’

The man, striding steadily, started shouting back:
‘Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae “Malleus Jesu”. Quid estis, quid
agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?

Always another door, Yuri thought. ‘Let me handle this.’ He spread his hands and walked forward, towards the angry stranger.

In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –

Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –

In the chthonic silence –

There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting
the fate of countless trillions of lives.

But time was short, and ever shorter.

In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.

This novel is about life on an ‘exoplanet’, a planet beyond the solar system. The first such planet orbiting a normal star (as opposed to a pulsar) was discovered
as recently as 1995. At time of writing we have discovered thousands of such worlds (for a recent survey see Ray Jayawardhana,
Strange New Worlds
, Princeton, 2011). The first discovery of
a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system was announced in October 2012 (see ‘An Earth Mass Planet Orbiting Alpha Centauri B’ by Xavier Dumusque et al.,
Nature
, 17 October
2012).