Mela was a projection of a mass artificial mind that, loosely integrated, spanned Mars, and what was left of Sol system - indeed, once it had spanned much of the Galaxy. Mars’s Mist was just part of it. This interplanetary colloquium of minds, meshed together in an endless conversation, called itself the ‘Conclave’, Mela told him. And sometimes she and the other Virtuals could sense the deeper thoughts of that mind, the vast undercurrents of its consciousness.
How strange she was, Symat realised as she spoke, strange in layers. She looked like a rather serious twelve-year-old girl; most of the time she acted that way. But she was old - far older than him, centuries old. She had been twelve all that time, looking after these other ageless children. And behind her, looking at him through her eyes, were misty ranks of ancient artificial minds.
‘And the Conclave,’ she said, ‘is very aware of you, Symat.’
‘Me? I’m not important. I’m just a kid.’
‘Apparently you’re more than that.’
The water had almost run dry. Reefs of baking mud clogged the basin of the canal.
They slowed to a halt, and stood in a glum group.
‘We’re past the point where the recycling pumps take back the water,’ Mela said. ‘Nobody tries to grow things further west than this any more. It’s too hot and dry. And every year this point is pulled further back.’ She looked up at Symat. ‘So we can’t go on.’
‘Look.’ Tod pointed at the bare ground, a hundred paces from the canal. ‘There’s a flitter.’
Symat shielded his eyes from the sun to see.
Mela said, ‘It’s your parents, isn’t it? They’ve waited for you here, where you could walk no further.’
‘I have to face them,’ Symat said grimly. ‘Maybe now they’ll take me seriously.’
Another Virtual coalesced out of the dusty air. It was Symat’s mother, grave, soberly dressed. Symat was astonished to see the streaks of tears under her eyes. ‘Come home, son,’ she said. ‘We’re here. In the flesh, in our flitter. We’ve come for you. Please come back.’ She didn’t even seem to see the Virtual children with him.
Impulsively Symat opened his arms. ‘I’ve made friends. Let me take them back with me.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘One, then. Let me take one.’
His mother glanced sideways; Symat imagined her looking at his father back in the family flitter, listening to that gravelly voice. Give him a victory. What does it matter?
‘Very well,’ his mother said. ‘Which one?’
Symat turned to Mela. ‘Come with me.’
She hesitated. ‘What about the boys?’
‘I think I need your help.’
She looked at him, and again he had an odd sense that she knew more about him than he knew himself, that other minds watched him through her eyes. ‘Maybe you do.’
‘No!’ Chem grabbed Mela. ‘Don’t leave us!’
Symat could see she was torn. ‘I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘This could be important. Just stay out of the way of the bloodsuckers and you’ll be fine.’
Symat’s mother put her own Virtual arm around Mela. ‘Come, dear.’ They started walking across the sand towards the flitter.
Chem, desperate, called after Symat, ‘You promised you’d stay, you promised you’d keep us alive.’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘They always say that. You won’t. You won’t! …’
Symat followed Mela and his mother, his heart breaking.
II
The flitter arrowed with perfect accuracy towards Kahra, capital city of Mars, where Symat had grown up. The ease of the journey was galling, after Symat’s slog on foot through the echoing deserts.
And as the flitter dipped low over the rooftops of Kahra, he saw lines of people snaking towards the transfer booths. The human population of Mars was passively draining into another universe. Symat glanced at his father, wondering if this part of the flight had been set up deliberately to show him the booths and the patient lines, to make a point. Hektor returned his gaze, impassive.
Symat’s parents’ villa, on the outskirts of Kahra, was spacious, airy. Mela and Symat wandered through it. The glass walls shone like fire in the light of the sun. Even after a million years on Mars some deep instinct made you aware that this tall, open design would have been impossible on heavy Earth, and the place felt all the more remarkable.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Mela said.
After his abortive adventure Symat wanted to puncture her awe. ‘It isn’t so special. There are much grander buildings than this, all over Kahra, in fact all around the twilight belt. All empty,’ he said harshly. ‘You can just walk in and take whatever you want.’
‘But this is home, to you. That’s the most important thing about it.’
‘I don’t like being here.’
‘But you don’t have anywhere else to go. You’re all stuck here together, you and your family.’
He studied her. ‘You’re very smart about this stuff. Perceptive.’
‘You think I’m too smart.’ Just briefly her projected image seemed to waver.
Symal felt angry. Why did he have to make friends with a weird, superhuman two-hundred-year-old Virtual? Couldn’t he just have found somebody normal? ‘You’re not even here, are you? Not really. You’re just a projection of some vast cobwebby thing.’
‘I’m here.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s just that I hear things. I can’t help it. I’ll go away, if you like.’
‘No.’ It had been a long time since anybody else of Symat’s age had come here. There had been few children around to begin with, and all his childhood companions had long since followed their parents into the booths. He couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone again. ‘You’ll have to do,’ he said.
She seemed to understand; she nodded.
They completed a circuit of the villa and found Symat’s parents. Hektor and Pelle sat in the grandest of the villa’s living rooms, while a small, silent bot, glass-hulled in sympathy with the architecture, laid out food and drink on a table.
Hektor stayed seated, but Pelle, Symat’s mother, stood up, a hopeful smile on her lips. ‘You two. Come and sit down. Are you still hungry?’ She waved her hand over the table; some of the dishes shimmered and broke up. ‘We have something for you too, Mela.’
Mela smiled. ‘Thank you.’ She selected a seat and, cautiously, sat down. The smart environment gave her a surface that matched the real-world seat flawlessly. She reached forward, picked a piece of fruit, and began to eat.
Symat sat too. Back home, he felt as if he had been reduced to a child once more. But it was obvious his mother, at least, was making an effort to reach him; she was even being considerate to Mela. And somehow with Mela here it wouldn’t have been right to show his resentment. So he accepted a drink.
As he had grown, Symat had often felt uncomfortable around his parents. They were so different from him, both tall and slender, matching the architecture of their Martian villa, while Symat was dumpy, squat, thick-set. Today Pelle was casually dressed, but Hektor wore the orange robe of a scholar, and his head was shaven. Both Symat’s parents had dedicated their long lives to archiving the human past on Mars, participating in a community act of remembrance to be completed before the final transfer through the booths. But in this domestic environment the robe made Hektor look formal, severe, the contrast with his son only more accentuated.
When he spoke, however, Hektor’s tone was mild. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘We just want to know what you’re feeling,’ Pelle said to Symat. ‘What made you—’ She faltered.
‘Run away?’
‘You don’t have to say sorry, son. We just want to understand. ’
His father leaned forward. ‘What I want to know is, where did you think you were going? You know your geography. There’s nowhere to go.’
Pelle snapped, ‘Hektor. He’s fourteen years old. What kind of plans do you expect him to make?’
Hektor said, ‘This is all about the booths, isn’t it? Everybody else goes through happily enough. All your little friends have gone.’ He ticked off names on his fingers. ‘Jann. C’peel. Moro—’
‘I don’t want to go into a booth,’ Symat said testily.
As always his father seemed genuinely mystified. ‘Why not?’
Symat waved a hand at the shining glass walls. ‘Because this is my home. My world. My universe! I hardly know anything about it. Why would I want to walk into nothing?’
‘Not nothing,’ Hektor said. ‘A pocket universe, connected to our own by an umbilical of—’
‘Symat,’ his mother cut in, ‘I wouldn’t change a hair on your head. Don’t ever think that, not ever. But I want what’s best for you. And this—it’s as if you are refusing medical treatment, say. We can’t just ignore it. Believe me, going into a booth would be the best choice - the Xeelee are coming - in the long run it’s the only choice.’
‘I think that’s the trouble,’ Mela put in brightly. ‘The trouble is he doesn’t believe you.’
Hektor snarled, ‘Who asked you, Virtual?’
Mela flinched.
Pelle held up her hand. ‘No. She’s right. Symat, we’ve always tried to educate you. But on some level we’ve failed.’ She seemed to be coming to a rehearsed suggestion. ‘So let us show you. Give us one day, that’s all. Just listen, watch, for one day. Try to see things from our point of view. And then you can see how you feel about the booths.’
Symat hesitated. ‘What if I still don’t want to do it?’
‘Then we won’t force you,’ his mother said.
‘In fact we can’t,’ Hektor said stiffly. ‘That’s the law. But you need to understand that we’re going through the booths, with or without you. After that you can do what you want. Stay here. Move away. There are others who choose not to come. Other oddballs and deadbeats—’
‘Just give us one day,’ Pelle said firmly.
Symat glanced at Mela. She nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.
Hektor stood up. ‘Then let’s not waste any more time.’ He spoke to the air. ‘Ready the flitter. We leave in five minutes.’ He clapped his hands, and the bot began to clear away the barely touched food.
Pelle patted Symat’s arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We can always eat on the ship—’
The flitter rose from Mars like a stone thrown from a crimson bowl. The little craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling. Mela peered out of the flitter’s transparent hull, wide-eyed; evidently she had never seen the world like this.
From here you could clearly see how Mars was divided into two hemispheres, barren landscapes of hot and cold, separated by a narrow belt of endless twilight. The canals, shining blue-black, laced across this precious strip. Kahra, a capital city almost as old as man’s occupation of Mars itself, was a green jewel that glimmered on the desert skin of the planet.
Looking down now, it struck Symat for the first time that Kahra was set slap in the middle of the twilight band, exactly poised between dark and light. But he knew that when Kahra had been founded Mars had still spun on its axis. He wondered if that positioning was a happy accident - or if the slowing rotation of Mars had somehow been managed so that Kahra ended up exactly where it needed to be. He had no idea how you might control the spin of a whole world, but then, it was said, the people of the past had had powers beyond the imagination of anybody now alive.
As the flitter swept through its rapid suborbital hop, the sun rose. Bloated, surrounded by a churning corona, the sun’s scarlet face was pocked by immense spots. Symat’s father had told him that the whole of the sun was a battleground between forces beyond human control, and from here it looked like it.
The flitter swooped down towards Dayside, the sunlit face of Mars. On blasted crimson rock cities still glittered. But there was no sign of life, no movement in the cities, and the canals were bone dry.
Hektor said, ‘Look down there. Nothing left but bugs in the deep rocks. Everything that can burn in those cities has gone already. Son, if you transplanted our villa down there it would turn into a shining puddle of melted glass. And it’s getting worse.’
‘Because the sun is still heating up.’
‘So it is. There is nothing we can do to reverse this. Soon the twilight belt will close, squeezed between hot and cold, and Mars will be uninhabitable, just as it was before humans came and terraformed it. And the last of us will have to leave, or die.’
This desolate prospect filled Symat with gloom, which it was in his nature to resist. ‘It might not come to that. What if the sun cools again?’
Pelle touched Symat’s arm. ‘It won’t. Those who are destroying the sun won’t allow it.’
To swell into a giant would have been the sun’s eventual fate, but not for billions of years yet. This premature destabilisation of the sun was deliberate. Creatures, malevolent and relentless, swarmed in its core, puddling the fusion processes there, and so compressing aeons of a stellar lifetime into mere megayears. And Sol was not the only star being smothered in its own heat. You only had to look around the sky, littered with red stars, to see that. ‘But it’s not personal,’ a teacher had told Symat once, with black humour. ‘The photino birds in the heart of the sun probably don’t even know we humans exist …’