Proxima

Chapter 31 2173

Stef Kalinski was summoned to Earth. Specifically to the office of Sir Michael King, at the corporate headquarters of Universal Engineering, Inc., in Solstice, Northwest Territories, United States of North America.

Summoned. To be called peremptorily like this was galling.

Major Stef Kalinski, twenty-nine years old, was now a full professor at her home institution in Vancouver, and also an officer in the International Space Fleet. She had worked hard to get here. Attaining a rank in the ISF had been a pain in the butt, and, in order to pursue parallel careers since the age of twenty-one, she had had to forgo such luxuries as a personal life. But the ISF had been the only route by which she could get an assignment to the one laboratory where the most exotic physics known to mankind was being pursued: the Wheeler Research Facility in Jules Verne, a farside crater on the moon, the only place in the solar system where you could get to properly study a kernel—unless you were allowed down to Mercury itself, which she wasn’t.

Her strategy had paid off. She was pretty eminent now; you only had to look at her publication and citation record to see that. She liked to think that if her father was still alive he’d have been proud of her, even if she had ended up studying the very phenomenon which had ruined his own career—but he had died years before, in an open prison on the fringe of the desertified core of France.

And now here was this “invitation”. The note she received even had a designated place and time, with attached clipper transit tickets, even before she’d agreed to go.

But it was a summons from Sir Michael King himself. After decades at the top King was still the big cheese at UEI, which in turn was still the primary paymaster at Verne, a notionally UN-run establishment, thanks to the immense profits UEI had made from patenting kernel technologies. And, as some of her colleagues half-joked, behind King was said to be the shadowy figure of Earthshine, one of the tremendous artificial minds that had been running much of the planet for nearly a century. You didn’t mess with Earthshine, they joked. Or half-joked.

Stef’s policy was to ignore such chatter and try to focus on what she wanted. At eleven years old, she had been there on the very day when the International-One, UEI’s first hulk, had lumbered into space from the sun-blasted plains of Mercury. Now those mighty kernel-driven ships criss-crossed the solar system, and had even set off for the stars. But she wasn’t allowed on Mercury, where the kernels were. Because of tensions with the Chinese, who still had no access to kernel technology, security around the kernel mines was ferociously tight, too tight for her. If this was a door opening a crack, a chance to get closer to the kernels, not just the tame handful that UEI had allowed to be shipped to the moon—well, she had to take it.

So she packed a bag.

Leaving the moon on a rocketship was unspectacular.

The UEI clipper’s crew squirted their thrusters to leave lunar orbit, and set off on an unpowered trajectory to Earth. Following a low-energy orbit, it would take Stef three days to fly from the moon to the Earth, just as it had been for Armstrong and Aldrin in Apollo 11 almost exactly two centuries before. And it was going to stay that way, even though mankind was now building ships powerful enough to reach the stars themselves. The use of anything other than minimum-energy strategies in the Earth-moon system had been banned by international agreement. The fragility of Earth in the face of interplanetary energies had become obvious in the days of the Heroic Generation, when the first really large structures had begun to be assembled in orbit around the Earth. In a few cases geoengineering technology itself had actually been weaponised: droughts and floods, for instance, had been inflicted on enemy nations.

At least the in-flight facilities were a little more advanced than in the Apollo days—including the sealed-off Love Nest at the rear of the main passenger cabin, which some of her fellow passengers used assiduously, and Stef ignored. She tried to work. And she spent long hours in the ship’s small gymnasium, using equipment adapted for microgravity, stressing her muscles against elasticised harnesses and shoving against a kind of robot sumo wrestler, preparing her body for Earth gravity after years at Verne, on the moon.

With the three-day transit over, the clipper skimmed Earth’s atmosphere and blipped its retro-rockets to settle into a high-inclination orbit of the planet, from which it would descend to land at the young city of Solstice, in the Canadian far north. It was a routine manoeuvre; all Earth’s passenger spaceports were at high latitudes these days, because that was where the dominant cities were—though commercial and military cargoes were still launched from more energetically efficient but climatically challenging equatorial sites, like Kourou. And as the clipper looped over the Earth waiting for final clearance to land, the passengers were given a grandstand view of much of the planet’s surface.

The face of Earth continued to evolve, following the huge shocks of the climate Jolts of the last century. At the coasts, much transformed thanks to the nibbling of sea-level rise, solar-power farms were spreading through the shallow waters of the flooded shores and river valleys, sprawling artificial meadows of gen-enged grasses supplying electricity grids through modified photosynthesis. This was part of a conscious global strategy to minimise the use of any energy source on the home planet save sunlight, because any other method meant an injection of additional heat to the world’s global balance.

Meanwhile, across the continental interiors, as glaciers vanished, aquifers were exhausted and the rain just stopped, the mid-latitude regions had been largely abandoned. Looping over the arid plains of Amazonia, southern Europe, Asia, even much of the territory of the old United States, Stef saw few signs of modern humanity save huge solar-cell farms. Great old cities still glittered in the intense sunlight, but there was nobody moving in there but archaeologists and historians, workers for resource extraction companies, and a few extreme-experience tourists exploring lost cities that, to the rising generation, were already half legend: New Orleans, Saigon, Venice, even the nuked remains of Mumbai.

The great population adjustments caused by the Jolts had all but run their course; the pandemics were over, the refugee flows had dwindled, and political alliances, even national boundaries, had been redrawn. Now new generations were growing up in brand-new cities set up in latitudes that would once have been seen as too extreme, in the very far north, and even the far south, on the coast of an increasingly ice-free Antarctica. Cities such as Solstice, near the shore of the Great Bear Lake, sitting precisely on the Arctic Circle in a northerly state of the new United States of North America into which Canada, with huge concessions from its suffering southern neighbour, had been absorbed.

A city down towards which the lunar clipper now swept for its final descent.

Chapter 32

The UEI corporate headquarters on the outskirts of Solstice had a relatively modest profile, just glass-block architecture tipped south to face the low sun. Once she was escorted inside the building, however, Stef glimpsed extensions underground, showy staircases like something out of the Titanic leading down to sweeping underground concourses.

Sir Michael King’s office was above ground, somewhere near the centre of the complex. The day was fine and bright, and the glass-walled offices were filled with the Arctic sun’s slanting light. Led by an aide, Stef was brought to a wide, airy room at whose very centre a single desk was set up overlooking some kind of pond, a smooth glassy surface that reflected the clear blue light of the sky. King himself sat behind the desk, she saw as she approached. In his late fifties now, heavy-set, his thick hair snow-white, King was famous and unmistakable. To one side another man sat, apparently relaxed, on an upright chair, a tall, slim, sober figure. They both had drinks on the desk before them.

To reach the desk the aide led her across an ocean of rich blue pile carpet marked with the UEI logo. Stef walked stiffly, trying to mask the gravity heaviness, the fatigue. It didn’t help that she had to skirt that central pond. Its clear water contained fish, she saw as she passed, big carp by the look of them, sleek golden forms that swam around and around. There was nothing in the pond with them, no fronds or reeds. They were like a virtual abstraction, Stef thought.

Both men stood as she approached, the visitor with a smooth, slightly unnatural grace, and Michael King heavily, his hands on the surface of the desk. He was wearing a kilt, she saw. The aide stood by, silent, discreet.

“Major Kalinski,” King said. He proffered his hand, which she shook.

“Good to see you again, Sir Michael.”

“Hell, just call me Michael. Everybody gets my titles confused since King Harold made me a thane. You know, I’m one of only three individuals to have been knighted both by the King of Angleterre at Versailles, and by King Harold of North Britain. And me an Aussie! But then they both lay claim to be head of state of what’s left of Australia… Do you like the kilt by the way? Wore it to my investiture in Edinburgh. So glad you’ve come. I do have another visitor, as you can see.” He watched her closely now, as if anticipating her reaction. “Major Kalinski—meet Earthshine.”

Earthshine.

Stef, shocked by the unexpected introduction, reached out a hand, then withdrew it in confusion. “Sorry.”

The Earthshine avatar smiled at her. Tall, solid, dressed in a sober suit and collarless shirt, it, he, looked like a handsome fifty-year-old of the political class. On his lapel he wore an odd brooch, a disc of granite carved with concentric grooves, a single slash to the centre. When he spoke his accent was soft British. “Please don’t apologise.” He reached for the desk with two hands; he picked up his own glass—but his fingers passed through King’s tumbler, where they broke up briefly into a flickering cloud of pixels. “I do use programmable-matter android forms sometimes, but I much prefer the holographic form if the bandwidth is adequate. All depends on the circumstances, of course.”

She tried not to stare. So the comedians back at Verne had been right, more than they knew. She realised that she had no idea what cavernous thought processes were going on behind this smiling-politician-type facade. Why was Earthshine here? Why was she here?

King said, “Major, as you just experienced, Earthshine isn’t really here with us at all. In as much as he’s anywhere, he’s down in a vast computer complex under Fort Chipewyan, right in the heart of the Canadian shield and as stable a geological site as you’ll find. Snug in his bunker, with layers of replicators building new components for him from raw rock, and feeding off Earth’s inner heat. And with multiple backups across the continent…”

“Whereas you, Michael, live so modestly, here in your glass Versailles.”

King laughed easily. “Well, I’m not some silicon demigod like you. But I’m a salesman, and I have to impress the punters and the investors. Sit down, both of you, please. Do you like the fish, by the way, Major Kalinski?”

“Are they artificial? Some kind of robot—”

“No, no. But they’ve been gen-enged to photosynthesise. They need nothing but light, and some dissolved nutrients in the water, to survive. A new UEI initiative, photosynthesising animals, a new way to make more efficient use of the sunlight. Have to be careful about the post-Heroic protection laws, of course. The pond’s an extreme environment for them, but it makes a striking demonstration of their nature, don’t you think?”

“It must be a little boring for them. The fish.”

He rubbed his chin. “Well, maybe. Hadn’t thought of that. Not much for them to do all day, swimming around in their little tank. Just like you, eh, Earthshine? I ought to do something for them, though, you’re right, Major. Maybe put in one of those little treasure chests. Make a note, Briggs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh—where are my manners? Major, would you like a drink? I laid on a treat for you. Briggs?”

The aide raised a kind of wand, and a section of the desk opened. A tray rose up bearing a selection of sodas, many in antique-looking classic-design cans, presumably not made of aluminium.

Stef shook her head. “Oh, not for me, thanks.”

King looked crestfallen.

Earthshine said smoothly, “I think you should force yourself, Major. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this.”

“It’s true,” King said. “I remember on Mercury how you said the soda was always flat. Now you’re stuck on the moon and I guess it’s the same up there, right? I never did get around to researching a fix. I figured that if I dragged you all the way back to Earth, the least I could do—”

“I appreciate you remembering, after all this time.”

“I told you then, didn’t I? People are everything in this life. Contacts. You have to cultivate them. Remember the names of their puppies—”

“But I’m not eleven years old any more, Sir Michael.”

Earthshine laughed out loud.

King grinned. “Speak your mind, don’t you? I remember that about you too. Oh, hell, if you’d prefer something else—”

“No, no.” She took a diet soda. It tasted more sour than she remembered, but it did bring back some memories.

King watched her astutely. “Takes you back to when you were a kid, right? You had a strange kind of childhood, didn’t you? I remember you lost your mother when you were very young. And then your father was always kind of distracted by his work, I guess.”

She shook her head. “In a way. But I understand. Now I’m distracted. So distracted I don’t have a family at all.”

“I’m sorry for what became of him. The trial and so on.”

She shrugged. “It’s in the past.”

“I, too, sympathise,” said Earthshine. “Being a relic of the so-called Heroic Generation myself. No doubt they would lock me up if they had the chance.”

King winked at Stef. “Believe me, they’ve tried.”

Stef snapped, “Can we get on to the reason you brought me here?”

King looked surprised, then laughed. “Down to business, eh? You always were impatient, I remember that of you as well. You even got restless during the countdown for the launch of that first hulk, the I-One, didn’t you?”

“Not restless. I was just a lot less interested in some big dumb piece of heavy engineering than I was in the kernels that powered it.”

“Yes, the kernels. The objects you have devoted your life to studying, in the end.”

“Strictly speaking, the physics behind them, yes. And that is what you brought me here to discuss, right? But look, Sir Michael. I’m no expert in international law. I do know that kernel science is supposed to be kept from the Core AIs.” She hesitated, looking at Earthshine. “No offence,” she said awkwardly.

“Great heavens, none taken.”

“That’s true, of course,” said King. “And you know why, don’t you? Because we don’t trust you, Earthshine. We have to deal with you. I have to meet you, what—every other week? But we don’t like you, or trust you. Sitting in your lairs, your hardened bunkers in the bedrock, plugged into all the world’s essential systems. You and your cousins on the other continents, Ifa and the Archangel.”

“Oh, not cousins. Rivals, perhaps,” Earthshine said mildly. “Companions, sometimes…”

Stef got the distinct impression that they had worked together for too long, that King chafed under the burden of a requirement to report to this strange old artificial entity. They were like bickering academics in some crusty institution, she thought.

King said now, “Major, you do understand what we’re dealing with here? The big continental AIs, the Core AIs as they are called, were spawned in the first place in the pre-Heroic days. They came out of a global network of transnational companies, a network which collectively controlled much of the world’s economy. Within that network nodes of deeper interconnection and control emerged: ‘super-entities’, the economic analysts called them. They were still at the level of human culture. But beneath the corporate super-entities, intensive AI capability necessarily clustered. Then came the demands for security for core processors and data backups, hardened refuges linked by robust comms networks. Well, they were given what they wanted.” He grinned, rueful. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Earthshine said, “The early members of the Core were essential to the great projects of the Heroic Generation. Supremely intelligent.”

“But they were not human,” King said sternly.

“The kernels,” Stef said, trying to wrench the conversation round to the point. “It must have taken a monumental effort to keep the science of the kernels away from the Core AIs.”

King nodded grimly. “It did indeed. The fact that the kernels were found on Mercury, and are studied nowhere closer to Earth than the moon, all helped. That and the fact that the danger was spotted immediately.”

“What danger?”

“That we would understand,” Earthshine said, “where you do not.”

Stef asked coldly, “What don’t I understand?”

“The true physics. Such as the unified theories known as quantum gravity, among other labels. They remain as tantalisingly out of reach to you as they ever were, have been for centuries. You only know them by limits, low-energy approximations—like relativity, quantum physics. As if you are trying to understand the structure of a diamond by studying a single edge. To explore reality further is beyond your engineering capabilities; to compute more is beyond your intellects. In fact, you’ve learned more by playing with kernels, which are quantum-gravitational toys, than you have from all your theorising in the two hundred years since Einstein.”

Stef scowled. “You’re saying that quantum gravity might be too hard for a mere human like me ever to understand.”

“But not for me,” Earthshine said. “Perhaps, anyhow. Which is why those of small minds and smaller hearts, like Sir Michael here, have kept the kernels from us. What might we achieve if we had such knowledge?”

King looked at Stef. “You’ve spent most of your adult life off-planet, Major. See what we have to deal with down here? Crap like this, day after day, decade after decade…”

And Stef did see it, saw a fundamental dichotomy between the two branches of mankind as they were emerging in the new era. The spacegoing were outward-looking, expansive, physically exploring the universe. While the Earthbound were stuck in this gravity well, dominated by legacies of the past, such as these dreadful old indestructible AIs cowering in their holes in the ground. Suddenly she longed to be in space, back on the moon—anywhere but here on this old planet, this museum of horrors.

“Why have you brought me here?”

“We want you to go to Mercury, Major Kalinski,” King said. “Or rather, go back to Mercury. I will accompany you in person, to the kernel beds, as they have come to be known.”

And there was the opportunity she had come here in hope of, all the way to Earth. But she was baffled. “Why? What do you want of me there?”

“You’re going to have to see for yourself, Major. We’ve found something.” He glanced at Earthshine. “Something so significant, of such long-term importance to mankind, that I feel we’ve no choice but to bring it to the attention of these Core AIs. Because if the buggers are useful for anything, it’s thinking about the long term. And we need someone like you, a kernel physicist. We don’t know what to make of it. We’re hoping you might be able to make informed guesses about it, at least.”

“About what?”

“Something strange,” said Earthshine.

Chapter 33

In the endless afternoon of Per Ardua, time flowed unevenly, like the flares that ran across the face of Proxima itself. Sometimes there seemed no interval at all between waking and getting ready to sleep again. And sometimes the days-that-were-not-days dragged, and Yuri felt as if he was back in the solitary tanks in Eden.

Their Earth-based calendars became irrelevant. Increasingly they marked the passage of time by events, by stuff that changed their lives for better or worse. The weather had turned, for one thing; four years after the landing, Proxima’s face was now crowded with massive sunspots, and its flows of heat and light were reduced enough to make a perceptible difference. The climate was more like a crisp late autumn afternoon, from what Yuri remembered of the North Britain of his boyhood. Sometimes there was even a sparkle of frost on the green leaves in the little colony’s fields, and the ColU fretted about its strawberries. Yuri remembered how Mardina had once told him how stable this stellar system was. No dinosaur-killer rocks here, and so on. But the star itself, it seemed, was in fact a source of instability. And the planet too, with that geological uplift they’d long been observing to the north. Not that they could do anything about all that but endure.

And then there was Mardina’s pregnancy.

Once they had begun their awkward, rather businesslike lovemaking, she had conceived quickly, Yuri suspected to their mutual relief. The ColU, in its role as family doctor, had insisted on tracking the stages of the developing pregnancy by the book. So the human-event calendar in their heads had filled up with more memorable moments: the day the morning sickness started, the day the bump was first visible to Yuri, the day Mardina felt the first kick, the day she let Yuri feel a kick. Now she was coming to term, and soon there would be another monumental event for their memories: the birth of a child.

The farm was developing too. With the aid of the ColU it was proving easy for them to extend their few small fields, each coated with terrestrial topsoil and watered by irrigation ditches running from the lake. While the growing stuff, lurid Earth-green, had attracted the attention of the local wildlife—including a flock of spectacular kites the size of herons that periodically came down to investigate—a potato leaf was essentially inedible to an Arduan, and once the crops were established there were no native blights that could harm them. All this had been planned for. The ColU had the capacity to support fourteen people, and their offspring; to provide for one couple was well within its ability.

But after four years on Per Ardua, to Yuri’s eyes—especially when he returned from a hike to the lake or the forest, and he saw it as a whole, from afar—the farm, their little colony, still didn’t look like it fitted in here, in the Arduan landscape. The rectangular fields with their neat rows of Earth-green plants, the tidy geometry of their conical house, the exclusion of the local Arduan life—even the dirt discoloured by their footsteps and the churn of the ColU’s wheels—the whole thing looked like an unhealed wound on the face of this world.

Mardina, however, looked less out of place. They had both abandoned their ISF-issue outfits by now, and wore looser clothing mostly made from local materials. In her tunic and short-cut trousers, coolie hat and bark sandals, and with her skin coated with grey-orange Arduan dust, Mardina wore the shades of the planet. Humans had come here to colonise Per Ardua. But, Yuri thought, what was really happening was that Per Ardua was colonising the humans.

And what drew all three of them, including the ColU, away from the farm and deeper into the embrace of Per Ardua were the builders.

On another dull day, their chores done, on impulse Yuri and Mardina trekked out to the lake. It was midday, by their human clocks. The ColU was already out at the shore, pursuing its own interests.

Mardina had become fascinated by the builders’ big projects around the Puddle: the dams that obstructed the inflow streams from the higher ground to the north—dams established long enough now to have created extensive floods behind them—and the more mysterious middens on the southern shore, with their banks and arcs. She walked along the lake’s northern shore, capturing images on her slate and sketching maps and diagrams with a stylus. “We still have no idea what all this is for. But whatever the hell they’re doing here, it’s evidently a lot more interesting than us digging in a few potatoes. Does it ever strike you how incurious they’ve been about us recently?”

That was true. The builders around the lake, a few hundred individuals gathered in a dozen small bands, all seemed part of a single community. Once the group around the nursery area on the western shore had got used to the idea that these strange, lanky, stemless creatures and their big rolling box were harmless, the other bands had soon seemed to pick up the same message, and stopped reacting to them. Unless you stood right in front of one and somehow impeded its progress, the builders just ignored the humans, spinning around you as if you were of as little interest as a lump of rock.

“I think they’re working up to something,” Mardina said now. She sounded breathless, and she sat on a lump of rock, her slate on the ground beside her. It was another chilly day and she wore an old fleece jacket over her stem-bark tunic. “All this work, the dams and mounds. They run around like this all the time, but the activity seems to be getting more intense every time I come out here.” She massaged her lower spine with both hands; backache had plagued her pregnancy.

“Maybe.” Yuri squatted on the ground beside her, dug a water bottle out of his flask and handed it to her.

She waved it away. “You go find the ColU. I’ll stay and watch a while. Wouldn’t want to miss the show, whatever they’re planning, if it all happens to kick off today.”

He stood. “You’re sure you’re OK?”

He knew what reaction he’d get for that, and he got it. “You’re worse than that bloody nursemaid on wheels. My brain is still functioning, more or less, thank you, so don’t fuss, ice boy. Just piss off and go and annoy the ColU.”

“All right. You’ve got water, you’ve got—”

“The flare pistol, yes, I’ve got it, and I’ll fire it up your defrosted arse if you don’t bugger—off.”

So he did.

He soon found the ColU.

The big machine had rolled up to one of its own favoured sites for builder-watching, which was the eastern shore. Here there was no intense construction activity, as there was at the north and south shores, and no nurseries as at the west. The builders were always busy here, but engaged on smaller-scale tasks. For instance they had built an elaborate series of traps out into the lake water, from which they extracted small fish-like creatures, with stem-based skeletons like the rest of the wildlife but wrapped in a skin-like streamlined webbing—a casing easily unwrapped, and the contents picked apart and incorporated into other bodies.

And the builders weren’t so busy that they could not be distracted by a dancing robot.

Of course the ColU couldn’t really dance; it was built more like a tank than a ballerina. But, given Mardina’s lead, it had become ingenious at simulating builder-dancing with the forest of manipulator arms that sprouted from its deck. Now, before an audience of three builders, all adults—of course there would be three, or nine, or twenty-seven of these creatures of three-fold groupings—the ColU put on a show. It held up heavy-duty arms to simulate the three main limbs of a builder, and while it couldn’t literally make its puppet-builder spin around, with a kind of sleight of hand, its smaller arms twisting and writhing, it made it look as if it was spinning, accompanied by the nods, rocks and gestures that characterised builder movements.

The builders were not watching passively. They spun and dipped in their turn, as if they were speaking to each other as well as to the ColU—as if it had been accepted into some kind of conversation.

One of them was injured, Yuri saw; it had a damaged leg stem, broken near the base, so that it hobbled, its spinning a little off-balance. And as Yuri approached, he sensed a strange, intense smell, a smell of the lake, the stems—the scent of builders, amplified and enhanced, a scent reproduced artificially by the ColU.

“Welcome, Yuri Eden!” the ColU called, continuing its puppet show.

Yuri kept back from the little group. “You look as if you’re actually talking to them.”

“Indeed! I have made spectacular progress in the months since I was inspired by Lieutenant Jones’s intuitive grasp that the builders’ dancing is a kind of communication. I have begun to build up an extensive vocabulary of ‘words’, which—”

“I didn’t know you’d got so far. You haven’t told us about any of this.”

It sounded faintly offended. “I was waiting to complete the project. Or at least bring it to the point where I could make a proper report.”

“This isn’t an academy.” That was one of Mardina’s choice lines. “Just tell me what you’ve learned.”

“A lot—or perhaps only a little. You must appreciate the challenge. Humans share a universal grammar that derives from your body shape, the way you interact with your environment, your experience of birth, life, death. A builder’s experience—the way a creature that is half-animal, half-plant by terrestrial categories apprehends the world—really is quite alien, and therefore so is its language. Also builder communication has a whole range of components, the most important being the gestural—the dancing—and scent: they emit body chemicals at will. I get the sense that they are a very old species, Yuri, and their mode of communication is very ancient. I mean ancient in the biological sense. Much older than human languages. Indeed, it has surely evolved on biological timescales, rather than cultural. As a result their language is wideband, in a way, with many channels of discourse, most of which I suspect I have yet to discover.

“So we started with the basics, with simple nouns for obvious concrete objects. ‘Lake’ was the first, as you can imagine.” Its arm-puppet gave a series of twirls, and Yuri smelled a sharper tang. The builder audience responded in kind. “But even for a simple concept like ‘lake’, the builder word is much more complex, with many meanings overlaid; it means something like ‘the interface between mother and father which brings life’. That is my perhaps clumsy interpretation. It is as if every time I use the word ‘lake’ I give you its history in terms of a Latin root imported into English via Norman French, together with mythological footnotes—”

“Mother and father, though?”

“Ah, yes: to them Proxima is the father, in terms of emotional analogies with the human condition, and the world, Per Ardua, is the mother—or more specifically, I think, the term refers to the lichen-rich nutrient patches in which their young take root. The adults who actually nurture infants are referred to by a term I think translates as something more like ‘midwife’ rather than ‘parent’. From such beginnings I have established many more common terms, for water, earth, sky, hot, cold, big, small—”

“What do they call us?”

“We each have our individual names. They don’t have a class name for humans. There are only three of us—including myself—and we are all very different in their eyes. Your name, and Mardina’s, are variants on a phrase that means ‘single stem’.

“They aren’t great conversationalists, Yuri! Their language is simple, really, with a very wide vocabulary, lots of labels, but only elementary grammatical rules. And much of what they say to each other consists of stock sayings. Like slogans, or folk sayings.”

Yuri tried to think of an example. “Such as, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’?”

“Yes. But a builder analogy might be, ‘Dig it up before you make it.’ This is another aspect of their antiquity, Yuri Eden. We’ve seen them use stone tools. But before they go to the trouble of making a new tool, they will grub at the ground and see if they can dig up a discard, a tool left by some forebear that might be thousands of years old. They’ve been wandering here for a long, long time: the ground is evidently rich enough in abandoned artefacts to make that sort of strategy worthwhile. And there isn’t a lot of innovation across the generations; they expect the tools left behind by their ancestors to be pretty much the same as what they make and use today. The language is the same, a collection of phrases and sayings, bits of wisdom handed down, polished from overuse.”

“What do they call themselves? Not builders…”

“ ‘The Fallen’. That is a human analogy; their term is something like ‘the semi-disarticulated’. But I think the concept of falling, that is falling from grace, is appropriate. ‘Everything is shit, and so are we.’ That’s perhaps their most common slogan; they use it to say hello, goodbye, and as an interjection in conversation. Though the term isn’t ‘shit’, it is something like ‘the marrowless and broken husk of a dead stem’. They seem to regard the whole universe as a dismal ruin, with themselves as worthless as cockroaches picking their way through the rubble. By human standards they are almost comically gloomy, I suspect.”

“Yet they raise their infants.” Yuri glanced at the injured builder, who still danced before the ColU’s puppet. “And they care for their sick.”

“That they do—”

It broke off. The arm-puppet stopped “dancing” suddenly, the manipulator arms folded away, and the ColU rolled backwards on its tracks and turned to face the north shore. The builders stopped too, evidently startled by the ColU; after freezing for a moment they abruptly began a new conversation among themselves.

Yuri looked to the north. An orange spark was climbing into the sky: a flare.

The ColU was already rolling away. Yuri ran after it as fast as he could, but he was easily outpaced.

Chapter 34

By the time he intercepted the ColU it was already on its way back to the settlement, with Mardina riding on its front unit, leaning back against its bubble-dome cover. As it rolled along the ColU’s endlessly adaptable manipulator arms were working on Mardina’s belly, massaging it in great downward sweeps.

Yuri jogged alongside. “Are you all right?”

“What does it look like?” she snarled back. “My water’s broken. I’ve had a couple of contractions. And my back’s killing me.”

“Everything is under control,” the ColU said calmly, rolling presumably as fast as it dared.

“Shut up, you.”

“Here.” Yuri took off his stem-bark tunic, rolled it up, and shoved it behind Mardina’s back. She accepted this, at least. “What else can I do?”

“You can piss off and leave it to me and my robot doctor here. I—ow—oh, you little bastard!”

“Please run ahead, Yuri Eden,” the ColU said. “We will be using the house; please make it ready, as we have planned.”

Mardina snapped, “Just get on with it, you—ow!”

So Yuri hurried ahead.

They’d rehearsed all this. At the house he cleared out his own gear to one of the storehouses, moved Mardina’s bed closer to the door, and lit a fire in the hearth. He made sure that all their remaining ISF-issue medical packs were on hand, close to Mardina’s bed. He widened the doorway too, removing a few panels that they had pre-fitted to ensure the ColU had access to the house when it needed it.

When the ColU arrived, Mardina was adamant. “Out, ice boy. I don’t want you anywhere near me.”

“It’s my kid too—”

“It’s my bloody pelvis. Out, out!”

The ColU murmured, “I think it’s best, Yuri Eden.”

“All right, all right.”

“I will call you when—”

“I said all right.” Yuri stamped out.

He had to watch as the ColU cautiously worked its way into the house; it wouldn’t fit all the way inside, and Yuri, on a request by the ColU, draped a tarpaulin over its protruding rear end, blocking off the entrance to the house.

After that he could see nothing of the birth.

The labour took hours, and sounded difficult. Not that Yuri had any prior experience. He could hear screams and weeping, and the calm voice of the ColU urging its patient to breathe, breathe.

After a time he wandered off, seeking a chore that might distract him, in the fields, in the little storehouse they had put aside as a workshop. Nothing seemed meaningful. Everything that was important in his universe, all that mattered on this world, was going on inside the house he had built with Mardina, and he could do nothing to influence it.

On impulse he walked away from the camp, heading back towards the lake.

A cloud of depression gathered. What use was he? He had been on Per Ardua for four years already. In one random bout of clumsy, only half-satisfactory sex he had done all that Mardina had ever needed of him, or would ever need. He felt as if he had no identity—and he hadn’t, not since his parents had bundled him into the cryo tank in Manchester. Even here, in this little two-person colony, he didn’t matter, not fundamentally, not when it really came to it. He had had such moods since waking up on Mars. Generally he fought them off with work. It was harder alone.

He climbed a bluff, from where he had a good view of the lake. He could see those dams and the brimming floods behind them to the north, and those strangely shaped middens to the south. From here he got a clear sense that the whole layout of the middens really was integrated, somehow, as if all these constructions served a single purpose. And he saw builders moving on those north and south shores, blurs of movement as they spun, tracked, congregated in little groups that quickly broke up and reformed elsewhere. Mardina was right; they were building up to something, some big stage in whatever project they were working through.

And all of them, of course, utterly ignored the human being standing alone on this bluff watching them, this visitor from another star. What an astonishing thing—as if Egyptian slaves had continued labouring over their pyramids while ignoring the silvery UFO that had landed in the shadow of the Sphinx. But why shouldn’t they ignore him? He didn’t matter to his own people, and never had; why should he matter to these aliens?

There was a kind of cracking sound.

He saw a spray of water rising up from one of those dams to the north, as if it had suddenly been breached. Had it failed? But another crack came, like a cannon shot, and another, and he saw more sprays of misty water lifting into the air from other dams, and he heard a kind of roar.

It was no accident. Those dams had been timed to fail, all at the same time, or were being deliberately demolished, one by one, and the roar he heard was the flow of released water; the great floods trapped behind the dams must be gushing forward into the lake. But why was all this being done?

And now he heard a popping noise, coming from behind him.

He turned to look back at the camp. Another flare had been fired; a spark of orange light lifted high into the sky, over their conical house.

He climbed down off the bluff and ran back, as hard and fast as he could.

By the time Yuri arrived, the ColU was backing out of the house. It was holding a bundle of blankets. Yuri would never have imagined that a bunch of killer-robot manipulator arms could have expressed such tenderness.

Abruptly, the ColU began to speak, loudly. “What an ugly child! Practically a monstrosity. And it’s going to be badly behaved all its life, I can tell just by looking at it, and nothing but a burden to its wretched parents…”

“ColU! What the hell are you doing?”

In a more normal tone it said, “Following the Lieutenant’s instructions, Yuri Eden. Scaring off the evil spirits that attend every birth, in malevolent hopefulness. And now…” Carefully, slowly, like some heavy orbital spacecraft gingerly attempting a docking with a space station, the ColU handed the baby to Yuri.

Yuri had had some instruction in this, even practice with bundles of clothes and blankets overseen by a stern Mardina, and he knew how to support the child, how to cradle its head. Deep in the mass of blankets was a small, crumpled, pink, moist face with closed puffy eyes, and hair plastered down by fluid. The hair was black like its mother’s, but straight like its father’s. Looking down at the child, Yuri felt something shift and break inside him, like a collapsing dam of his own.

“Beth,” the ColU said. “Her name is Beth Eden Jones. The mother is fine. Mardina’s going to try to sleep, but she said she will see you.”

“Thank you.”

“It was my function. But I appreciate your saying that, Yuri Eden.”

A memory floated to the surface of Yuri’s mind. It seemed distant, almost irrelevant. “You might want to take a look at the lake.”

“The lake?”

“While you were in there with Mardina—there have been developments.”

“I will. Go and see the mother, Yuri Eden.” It turned and rolled away, in the direction of the lake.

Yuri stepped into the house. The tarpaulin he’d hung to cover the ColU’s rump was still dangling from hooks, shutting out the day. Inside the house was a smell of blood and bodies, and antiseptic, and the scent of the still-burning fire—a stem scent that was suddenly, sharply, redolent of the builders, as if those gloomy, dogged creatures were in here singing a lullaby. Mardina lay flat on her bed, looking exhausted, but she was cleaned up, in a fresh nightgown, with her hair brushed back, her face washed. She smiled when Yuri stood over her with the baby. He saw that the cot that the ColU had fabricated, a structure of Arduan stems, stood ready beside her bed.

He asked, “Do you want anything?”

“No. Well, to sleep in a minute. Just wanted to see you.”

“Nicest thing you ever said to me, astronaut.”

“Don’t push it, ice boy.”

“So this is Beth.”

“My mother’s name. You have any objections?”

“Of course not. I think I expected your mother’s name to be—”

“More exotic? ‘Elizabeth’ is what they called her in the school she grew up in, after the Desiccation Resettlement. She was separated from her own mother. Never knew her birth name.”

“Beth it is then.”

“Sure… What are you feeling, Yuri?”

He tried to express it. “Like I stepped through another door.”

“Your life has changed again, huh. So now here she is. Phase One of the grand plan, remember? Our retirement insurance, and the loins of the next generation.”

“She’s none of those things. She’s Beth.” He looked down at the baby, at this piece of himself. “None of that Adam and Eve crap. I, we, we’re going to protect her, and nurture her, and give her as full a life as she deserves.”

Mardina raised her head weakly. “That’s a big promise, ice boy. I mean, for instance, how can she ever fall in love? Nothing’s changed in the bigger picture, Yuri. We’re still stuck here, alone.”

“Another door will open,” Yuri said calmly. “Just like before. And I’ll step through it, and I’ll take Beth with me, and you.”

Mardina smiled. “You know, right now, I believe you. But that’s probably the drugs talking. Let me sleep and get back to normal, and I’ll kick your butt properly.”

“I’ll put her in her crib…”

But Mardina, lying back, had already drifted away.

Chapter 35

Twelve hours later, with Mardina awake, and the baby’s first feeds negotiated successfully, the ColU drove up to the house. It waited outside until Yuri popped his head out of the door.

“Sorry to disturb you, Yuri Eden.”

“That’s OK, buddy.”

“It’s the lake. You alerted me to developments during the confinement. There have been more. I thought perhaps you would both wish to see. Well, all three of you.”

“I’m not sure if—”

“Count me in, ColU.” Mardina, swathed in a heavy ISF-issue overcoat, pushed her way out of the house. She breathed deeply. “Clean air in the lungs. Nothing better. Tell you what, I’ll put on my tracksuit and we’ll jog over.”

“We won’t, you know.”

“I think she is teasing you, Yuri Eden,” the ColU said.

She was grinning. “You’re so easy, ice boy. We’ll ride on the ColU, and you can walk. Deal?”

They took their time to get ready for the little expedition, with the ColU laden with blankets, water and hot drinks for Mardina, and expressed milk for the baby. Then they set off towards the lake. The air, under the increasingly mottled face of Proxima, was fresh, even cold.

Before they reached the eastern shore, they climbed one of the many shallow bluffs that studded this landscape and looked out over the lake.

Which had changed, dramatically. Those big flooded areas behind the northern dams were drained. But the risen lake water had now broken through its bank on the south side, and, guided apparently by the builders’ middens, was gushing into the dry river channel that Yuri had walked through many times. Already it was beginning to flood a depression some way to the south. Everywhere the builders were on the move, adults with infants, even a few apparent invalids being carried by parties of adults, streaming around the banks of the lake towards the outflow channel.

“They did this deliberately,” Mardina breathed.

“That’s correct, Lieutenant Jones. This has been engineered by the builders. The sudden release of the trapped flood water behind the northern dams created a surge that broke the southern banks and scoured the outflow channels, deepening and widening them. Now much of the lake, I calculate, will drain away. And it will reform in the depression you see to the south, which extends some way beyond, but which will drain in its turn… I have studied the topography. I believe that by the time this manoeuvre is completed, the lake will have been moved some ten kilometres to the south.”

“ ‘Manoeuvre’,” repeated Mardina, cradling the baby. “ ‘Moved’. The way you put that makes it sound as if you believe this was purposeful.”

“That’s exactly what I believe, Lieutenant Jones. The builders have engineered this; they have deliberately shifted the lake to the south. And once it is there, presumably, they will replant stem beds, perhaps restock the water with the fish analogues and other creatures… They have been aided by that steady uplift to the north, I mean the geological uplift, the magmatic event that appears to be occurring there. But, yes, it seems clear to me that they have moved this lake.”

“Why?”

“I have no answer to that,” the ColU said. “I can only speculate. But there must be a good reason. I suspect we will find out in time.”

Mardina asked, “So what does this mean for us?”

“That’s our only stable supply of water,” Yuri said. “We can’t rely on the rain. We know that. If the lake moves, we have to move with it.”

The ColU looked pained. “I have created whole fields of terrestrial topsoil at this site.”

“So we move the soil as best we can, as much as we can. It’s no use here without water. We’ll have to shift our other stuff too. The house, the buildings—maybe we’ll rebuild in some modular form, for when we have to break it all down again.”

“You mean,” Mardina said slowly, “when the builders shift the lake again, some time in the future.”

“Right.”

“Why should they do that?”

“If they’ve done it once, why shouldn’t they do it again?”

“The ISF imagined we’d be stuck here, in this place, for life,” Mardina said. “Tied to the lake for its water. Instead, the lake’s migrating, and so are we.”

“That’s right.” He grinned. “Everything’s changed.”

“And a door’s opened for you, ice boy. Just as you said it would.”

“Damn right. Now all we have to do is to step through. And who knows what we’ll find?”

“ColU,” Mardina said, “what did you say the builder phrase for the lake is?”

“ ‘The interface between mother and father which brings life’.”

“Hmm. And wherever it travels, yes, it will bring life. It is like the Dreamtime spirit that created the rivers and the waterholes. It is a jilla.”

Yuri nodded. “OK. Better name than Puddle anyhow.”

The baby started to cry, cold, tired, hungry. The ColU, moving with an oddly balletic grace despite its bulk, turned carefully, disturbing its fragile cargo as little as possible, and headed back to the camp.

Chapter 36

The flight by UEI hulk ship from Earth to Mercury was a high-energy straight-line blast across the solar system, at a constant one-gravity acceleration. Constant, save for one six–hour interval of microgravity, when the kernel drive was briefly shut down, the systems checked out, and the ship flipped over to begin its deceleration to the destination.

In this interval, while the drive was inert, Monica Trant invited Stef Kalinski to visit the hulk’s engine room. Led by an ISF crewman, they pulled themselves down a fireman’s pole that ran the length of the axis of the big, spacious tank that comprised the greater part of the hulk, down towards the engines.

“Thanks for this,” Stef said to Trant. “You know how it is. Since I graduated I’ve devoted practically my entire life to a study of the kernels. But I’ve only ever had access to the handful of specimens donated by UEI to the UN moon labs, and even there we’ve never been allowed to run the kind of high-energy experiments—”

“Like the ones our engineers run down in the engine rooms of hulks like the Shrapnel every day,” Trant said drily. “I know. Well, given the strangeness of what they seem to have found on Mercury, they’ve decided they need theoreticians after all. So fill your boots.”

They reached a security gate set in the base of the hulk, where a crewman held them up to verify their security-scan access to the engine room. Stef, weightless, clung to her pole and peered up into the great tank of the ship’s hull, brightly lit by fluorescent strips. On this trip the hull was more or less empty—incredibly, the main purpose of this high-velocity interplanetary flight seemed to be to bring her to Mercury—but she could see brackets and shadows in the paintwork where partition floors, loading cranes and other fixtures could be fitted. Right now ISF crew swarmed in the air, taking the chance to clean out clogged air filters and perform other chores in corners hard to access under gravity.

A hulk like this was regularly used to transport massive cargoes between the planets. Science samples, for instance. A century back, planetologists had crowed about samples returned to Earth from Mars by robot craft, samples which had been measured in grams. Now they brought back rocks that weighed tonnes, and kilometre-long cores of Martian polar ice. They had even run an experimental ship across interstellar space, to the habitable world that had been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri. And, routinely nowadays, hulks like this were used to transport hundreds of colonists to the UN bases on the moon and Mars. Stef thought she could smell the stink of all the people who had travelled in this ship, sweat and urine and baby milk, suffused into the very fabric of the ship.

Monica Trant saw her looking. “Not pretty, is it? But very effective. The Shrapnel is one of the more reliable members of UEI’s little interplanetary fleet.”

“Why Shrapnel? I thought the ship’s name was Princess Aebbe.” In the passenger lounges there were little animations of the launch of the ship from its dry dock at an Earth-moon Lagrange point by the youngest daughter of the North British King, and the royal family’s “Fighting Man” standard was splashed in lurid red and gold all over the hull, amid UN roundels and UEI logos.

“So it is. But all these hulks have more familiar names given them by their engineers. We don’t trust the kernels because we don’t understand them. So—the Mushroom Cloud, the Shrapnel, the Pancake.”

“Black humour.”

Trant looked at her quizzically. She was in her late thirties now, her hair greying and pulled back, but she looked fit, lean, clearly competent in her world. “Black humour, yes. You don’t spend much time around people, do you? I always remembered that about you, even when we were running Angelia from Yeats with your father. You were a withdrawn little kid, always had your nose pressed up to some screen or other.”

“You know kids, do you?”

“I’ve one of my own. Little Rob. Two years old now. Back home with his father…”

“You didn’t stick around long on the Angelia project.”

Trant seemed cautious. “I lasted a few years. Since Angelia went quiet there’s been nothing to do but archiving and recontact attempts. Look, Major—”

“Call me Stef.”

“Sure. No offence, I know Angelia was your late father’s pet project, but it was obsolete before it was launched. So I moved to where the action was, the new field of kernel engineering. As did you, in a way, right? I used contacts I made at the launch of the I-One. And now I’m one of UEI’s top internal consultants on kernel engineering. That’s how life is.”

Stef shrugged. Personal conversations like this, about people’s excuses for their life choices, didn’t interest her much.

“And you ought to feel honoured,” Trant said now. “These craft hardly ever fly empty, not since their proving flights. They must really want to get you to Mercury, huh?” She sounded faintly envious.

“I hope I can make a contribution,” Stef said neutrally.

At last the crewman got their access approved. He opened the hatch, and they passed out of the hulk’s big internal space, down through a thick bulkhead. They had to cycle through a kind of airlock, and Stef was aware of various kinds of security scans being run; shimmering lines, laser guides, swept over her.

“Just routine,” Trant said.

“Why’s it necessary? If any sabotage was attempted to the drive, probably the whole ship would be destroyed, saboteur and all. The energies are such that—”

“I do know,” Trant said, a little testily. “But we carry hundreds of colonists across the solar system, and some of them figure out on the way that they’re not too happy about becoming colonists after all, whether or not they were given a choice about it. They can get kind of desperate. People don’t always act rationally, Major Kalinski. And then there’s the Chinese factor.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Well, there you have a major power who’s still excluded from any share of this advanced, and very powerful, technology. If the UEI and ISF aren’t riddled with Chinese spies, if not saboteurs, I’d be surprised. So we take security seriously.”

They were passed through, and dropped down into a rest area, with a lavatory, a couple of bunk beds, a small galley.

And here Sir Michael King was waiting for them, loosely strapped to a couch, sipping coffee through a plastic cup with a nozzle. He was wearing a kind of coverall, deep royal blue, cut to fit his squat, heavy frame, that simultaneously looked practical and expensive. When Trant and Stef entered, swimming down from the ceiling, he pushed himself out of his chair. “Glad to see you made it down here, Major Kalinski.”

“Why wouldn’t I, sir?”

“Most passengers, especially those from Earth, spend most of their time during the accel-decel handover locked in their cabins chucking up.”

“I’m a veteran of the Earth-moon run. My body’s used to microgravity.”

“Well, mine isn’t,” King said. “I had to swallow a whole pharmacopeia.” He grinned, his face pale, sweating. “But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Trant nodded at the ISF crewman who, discreet and unspeaking, had followed them in here. “Let’s get on with it.”

The crewman opened another hatch, in the floor. Below, Stef saw, was a kind of carpet, speckled with lights that shone bright in a relative gloom. They followed the crewman down through the hatch, and spread out.

There were three, four crew already in this wide chamber, in their jet-black ISF uniforms, swimming over the illuminated carpet, carrying slates, making notes and murmuring to each other. The “carpet” was actually another bulkhead that spanned the width of the hulk, Stef saw now, and the lights that sparkled in the floor, more or less uniformly distributed, were a display. Flux lines swept between the lights, uniting them in a pleasing, swirling geometry—a three-dimensional geometry, Stef saw, as she shifted her head from side to side. The whole was littered with tiny labels, numbers and English letters; the systems sensed whatever she was looking at, and the labels magnified in her vision.

Trant said, “This is our engine room. We run everything through this one display. Under acceleration, this is a floor under our feet, but in microgravity it makes more sense to treat it as a vertical wall—you can see there are hand- and footholds…”

Sir Michael King was watching Stef intently. “This is as close as we can get to the real action. I mean, I understand the display we see here is just a representation of the reality, but… Can you feel them, Major? I know you’ve been around kernels for years, but not an array like this. Can you sense them? Can you feel their energies?”

And Stef thought she could, yes, a kind of tide that pulled at her body as she hung there in the air—a tide from the space-time knots of the kernels themselves, perhaps, or maybe a force exerted by the powerful magnetic fields that held them in place, a great wall of them contained not metres from her position. She felt thrilled, viscerally, physically; the pathetic handful of kernels in the lunar labs would have been lost in this huge assembly.

King said, “Here you are, confronted by the mystery. Tell me about kernels, Major Kalinski.”

“I can tell you what we think we know. Which is precious little.”

He pulled a face. “And I could tell you how much that inadequate reply has cost me so far.”

“Sorry.”

He said, “I know a kernel is a twisted bit of reality. Like a black hole, right?”

“That was our first guess. Black holes are similarly twisted bits of space-time, yes, the remnants of imploded giant stars, or maybe relics of the Big Bang. And all black holes radiate; they leak energy from their event horizons, and the smaller they get the hotter they are. But nothing fit. A kernel masses only kilograms, a lot less than any but the most evanescent black hole. And the energy it emits isn’t black-hole Hawking radiation but something much more exotic, a flood of high-energy photons and very high-speed particles, like cosmic rays. Also, the way the energy leaks from a kernel depends on the way you prod it.”

“You mean with laser beams,” King said. “Well, I know about that. A lot of lives were lost to establish that simple fact. And Mercury gained itself a new crater.”

“By manipulating it with laser beams you can shape the way a kernel releases its energy store. Get it right and it can even be unidirectional.”

“Like a little rocket.”

“A microscopic photon rocket, yes. And that’s what makes them so useful. The kernels carry an electric charge, and are so light that a powerful enough magnetic field can hold a whole bank of them in place, just as in this ship, behind this bulkhead. Fire the control lasers just right and they all open up, and you get a kind of photon rocket.”

“Driven by a light as bright as the sun,” King said. “Visible across interplanetary distances. Hell of a thing. After all these years, you know, I still can’t get used to the sight. But what I want to know from you, Major, is how the damn things work. Where does all that lovely energy come from?”

“Well, not from the structure of the kernel itself—it’s not massive enough for that. Our best guess is that a kernel is less like a black hole than a wormhole—”

“A tunnel in space.”

“Yes.”

“I thought wormholes were impossible,” Trant said. “You need some strange kind of matter to keep them open.”

Stef always got irritated when some lay person asked her a question and then started lecturing her about the answer, rather than just listening. She snapped, “It may have looked that way according to the kiddie Einstein-relativity stuff you learned at high school, Monica, before you gave up science for engineering. Have you ever heard of a dilaton field? No?”

Monica Trant looked irritated.

King raised luxuriant eyebrows, amused. “Well, that’s put you in your place. Let’s get to the basics. A wormhole is a tunnel, right? From here to… someplace else.”

“That’s right.”

“So the energy that flows out of a kernel, the energy we harness to drive our hulks, doesn’t come from the kernel itself. It comes from someplace else, and is just transmitted through the kernel.”

“That seems to be true. The ultimate power source must be some very energetic event, somewhere else. A gamma-ray burster, maybe. Could be from the future or the past.”

Trant frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

“The wormhole could connect you to any other point in space and time, sir. Or—”

King waved a hand. “Enough, enough. You know, Major, some people are suspicious of the kernels. I mean, their very existence. Your own father was, right? There we were struggling to come up with ways to reach the stars. And now we’ve been handed this magic power source, on a plate, and we’re off to Proxima Centauri. We needed a miracle, and suddenly we had one. The problem is, you see, Major, in business or in politics, hell, in most marriages, if I give you something, it’s generally because I want something of you in return. So what’s the catch?”

“You’re assuming agency,” Stef protested. “Intervention by some kind of consciousness. It’s better to rule that out until there’s overwhelming evidence. Occam’s razor: you should default to the simplest explanation, and natural causes are the simplest explanation we have for most phenomena. Including the presence of kernels on Mercury.”

Trant said, “Wait until we get you to Mercury, Kalinski.” She shook her head. “Occam’s razor. Jesus.”

A gong sounded, echoing around the ship.

King turned to the ladder up to the main hull. “They’re about to fire up again. You’ll find me in my couch, until my old bones get used to gravity again…”

Stef was allowed to stay down on the control deck, with Trant, the two of them strapped into acceleration harnesses, watching as the highly trained crew went through the process of firing up their laser banks, opening up their tame space-time knots, and allowing their unknown-source energy to stream out.

And the tremendous mass of the hulk was once more hurled forward into the heart of the solar system.

Chapter 37

At Mercury the Shrapnel entered a low equatorial orbit, and a small, low-powered shuttle flew up to bring Stef, King, Trant and a couple of ISF guards down to the surface. The little ship was piloted by ISF officers, who saluted Stef when she boarded while simultaneously security-scanning her. The shuttle had only one cabin, fronted by the pilot with the passengers in the back, and while the passengers strapped in Stef heard the crew talk through more complicated security protocols. Evidently this wasn’t a place where casual landings were welcome.

They came down in a sweeping powered descent across a shattered landscape. The shadows of crater-rim mountains, wave after frozen rocky wave of them, stretched across broken lava plains.

Trant turned to Stef. “Do you know where you are? On Mercury, I mean.”

Stef shrugged. “I only came back once to Mercury since the Angelia launch. It was a memorial service for my father after he died, given by the staff he worked with here.”

“I know. I was there, though we didn’t speak.”

“I think this must be the Caloris basin.” A tremendous impact crater that dominated one face of the planet. “Given the scale of the cratering features.”

“Correct. The result of an impact that couldn’t have been much bigger, to have left any planet behind at all. I suppose you don’t need to know much about Mercury to guess that much.”

“I’ve had no briefing,” Stef reminded her testily. “So it’s to be guessing games, is it, all the way down?”

“We want you here to take a fresh look at what we found. I suggested it was best not to prejudice you in any way. Blame me, if you like.”

Stef felt a shiver of awe, flying over this tremendous ruined landscape, which itself concealed a much more exotic mystery. What the hell were they being so secretive about?

On the ground, in the chaotic shadows of Caloris, they were bundled into a rover. There was a driver and a couple of crew, all in ISF uniforms. The two security goons who had come down from orbit with them followed too. Making her way to a seat in the rover, Stef experienced a gravity that was twice the moon’s, a third of Earth’s, a gravity that felt oddly familiar, a body memory from her childhood.

The rover rolled off, and through the small windows Stef glimpsed the landscape of Mercury, for her a peculiar mix of alien and familiar. The sun was just below the horizon here, though a smear of coronal light spread up into the sky. The shuttle landing site behind her was lit by brilliant floods.

“Here.” Trant opened a hatch and pulled out pressure suits. “One each. We’ll suit up en route in the rover.”

King awkwardly hauled his own suit over his bulk. “We’re making straight for the site.”

Stef asked, “What site?”

Trant said, “This is, or was, just another exploratory drilling site.”

“You were looking for kernels.”

“Essentially, though Mercury is also still exporting metals to the rest of the inner system. Stef, you’ll find dormitories in the well-head domes, showers, galleys. If you need a break before we descend…”

Descend into what? Every bit of information they gave her seemed to lead only to more questions. Let them play their games. “Let’s just get on with it.” Trying not to let their evident urgency transmit itself to her, she pulled on her suit, ISF standard issue, a piece of kit she was used to. The smart fabric slid into form-fitting shape around her; as the suit recognised her a panel on the chest lit up with her mugshot, rank, commission number, name: KALINKSI, STEPHANIE P.

King smiled. “That’s correct, isn’t it? P for Penelope.”

Stef pulled a face. “A name I always hated even more than ‘Stephanie’. So you found kernels in Caloris, right?”

Trant looked out at the smashed landscape. “We’ve developed pretty efficient ways to prospect for kernels, even from orbit. We look for concentrations of the kernels’ distinctive energy signature, at sites easy to mine. The heart of Caloris has given us some rich pickings, actually. The kernel lodes here aren’t always quite as deep as elsewhere on the planet, and the ancient impact shattered the bedrock, making it relatively easy to get through. ‘Relatively’ being the word.”

Stef thought that over. “Which implies that the Caloris impact came later than whatever event laid down the kernels.”

King nodded approvingly. “That’s what my tame geologists deduce. Even though the Caloris event itself was very old, a relic of the planet-formation days. The kernels have been down there a long time; whatever created them, or implanted them, was a very early event in terms of the history of Mercury—hell, of the solar system itself. So we drilled down into the floor of the crater, and that itself was a challenge, I can tell you. But what we found—well, you’ll see for yourself.”

The rover had to pass through a couple more security cordons before pulling up at what was evidently a drilling site, dominated by a single massive rig standing on an area of relative flatness. Stef saw hab domes covered in regolith for solar-radiation screening, a few more rigs much smaller in scale, and massive specialised vehicles.

As they unbuckled, Trant pointed out the equipment. “The rigs are structures of high-strength, high-temperature-tolerant carbon. Those smaller rigs were the first to make the discovery we’re going to show you. We brought out the heavy-duty gear to allow human access to the find; that big momma over there drilled out the shaft you’re going to be riding down today…”

A flexible transfer tunnel snaked out from a dome towards the rover. Trant led them through a brisk check of their pressure suits. “We’ll be riding a pressurised car down the shaft,” she said. “But we’ll wear the suits as a precaution anyhow. And of course the base chamber isn’t pressurised at all.”

Stef tried to figure out these pieces of the puzzle as she went through the routine of interrogating her suit’s functions. Shaft? Base chamber?

The rover hatch opened up, and they passed through the flexible tunnel to the dome. The interior was functional, with lab areas, bathrooms, suit lockers, a galley, bunks. A handful of staff here, in shirts and shorts, working or eating handheld snacks, eyed the newcomers in their pressure suits curiously, but didn’t approach them. Stef felt she could have been inside any pioneering-science-type establishment almost anywhere in the solar system, off Earth.

But this particular facility was dominated by a transparently walled elevator car, set at the very centre of the dome where the roof was highest, attached by winched cables to a stout metal frame. And the car was suspended over an open shaft, from which fluorescent light leaked.

A shaft. A hole in the Mercury ground. Into which, evidently, Stef was going to have to descend. She felt a frisson of fear, and she was grateful for her ISF training, for the ability it gave her to function despite her fear, even if she couldn’t hide it, probably.

Stef was led straight to the elevator, with Trant, King, and the two ISF goons who had ridden down from orbit with them and had barely spoken a word, even to each other. They all crowded into the car. It contained a crate, Stef presumed containing supplies or emergency gear. A door, transparent as the walls, slid closed behind them.

Immediately the car began to descend, with a soft, low-gravity lurch. The dome and its inhabitants ascended out of Stef’s sight, and the walls of the shaft rose up to enclose the car.

The shaft walls were smooth, featureless, and it was impossible to judge directly the car’s speed of descent. But Stef could feel the acceleration.

Then, with a snap, as she could see through the transparent roof, the cables from the winch disengaged. Yet the car continued to descend.

“This is a pretty fast ride.”

Trant grunted. “We had to custom-design the system. We’re going too deep for conventional cables, even under the low gravity. We fitted the car with crawler attachments; we’re clambering down the walls of the shaft.”

“Too deep,” Stef repeated. “How deep?”

“Over four hundred kilometres,” Trant said, with a touch of pride—justifiable, Stef thought. “We’re going all the way to the base of the planet’s crust. To the fringe of the mantle, in fact, which is where the kernels are found.”

“It’s quite a trip,” King said. “All this is hush-hush at present, you understand, but I have got a couple of tame journalists documenting all this for the history books. I’m given to understand that a crewed trip to the edge of a planetary mantle has never been achieved elsewhere, not even on Earth.”

Stef thought over what she knew about Mercury. “I thought the prevailing theory is that Mercury suffered a tremendous impact, back in the age of planet formation. The whack shattered and stripped away the planet’s upper rocky layers. Right?”

“That’s one theory,” Trant said. “There’s another that’s doing the rounds here. Informally, I mean. That whatever incredible event created or implanted the kernels on Mercury might have caused a huge convulsion of energy, a convulsion that nearly blew the planet apart.”

“Wow,” Stef said, impressed, but she reached for her native scientific caution. “Quite a hypothesis. Have you got any way of proving it?”

King said, “I rather think that’s why you’re here, Major Kalinski.”

The elevator car slid to a smooth halt, and the shaft walls seemed to lift like a curtain. Stef found herself looking out into a cavern, flat-roofed, cut into the deep rock. This cave, hundreds of kilometres under Mercury’s surface, was brightly lit, and there were more small domes, pressurised facilities, marked with UN and UEI sigils.

The purpose of the cavern was obvious too. Armed troopers in military-specification pressure suits stood in a loose circle around what looked like an unprepossessing patch of floor. Stef saw that scientific equipment of all kinds had been assembled around this bit of floor; lenses and other sensors peered down, and there was an industrial-strength laser mount. Something about the whole set-up, the sheer bizarreness of finding a science base and security cordon hundreds of kilometres deep under Mercury, made Stef’s heart hammer even harder.

“Time to close up your suits,” Trant said. “We’ll run through another full integrity check before stepping out of the car.”

Stef was glad of the long minutes of routine that followed. Since arriving in Mercury orbit she felt as if she had fallen too quickly into this place, this pit bored into the deepest rocky heart of the solar system; she needed time for her soul to catch up with her body.

At last the car door opened, the air sighed out, and Stef walked out, heading towards the circle of troopers, the enigmatic patch of floor they protected. She was locked inside her suit, listening to the air-circulation fans and her own noisy breathing. The troopers let them pass. And as they neared the very centre, King and Trant too stepped back, allowing Stef to walk forward alone, staring at the floor.

And there, set in the rock of Mercury, buried under hundreds of kilometres of crustal layers for billions of years until dug out by questing human hands and tools, was –

A hatch.

Chapter 38

Stef walked around the emplacement, trying to absorb the physical reality of it. Trying to observe rather than analyse, for now, the best strategy when faced with the utterly unexpected.

What did she see?

She saw a panel, a rough square of some seamless, pale grey material—metal, perhaps, or ceramic, or some unknown material altogether. It was maybe ten metres across. And at the centre of the panel was a circle, a fine seam engraved into the plain material, perhaps three metres in diameter. That was all, there was no further marking or indentation.

She turned to face King and Trant, who looked at her expectantly.

“Well?” King snapped. “You see why we didn’t tell you? You see why you had to look for yourself? And you see why we told Earthshine? It’s hard to think of a more significant development for the future of the human race.”

“It’s obviously artificial,” she said. She turned back. “Obviously—a hatch.”

Trant grinned. “That’s what everybody calls it. A common first reaction. In the internal reports we capitalise it. The Hatch,” she said heavily. She turned, gesturing at the walls. “There are kernels all through this layer. You could pick them out by hand. And in the middle of this rich lode, we found—this.”

“How did you detect it?”

“Initially by traces in deep radar pulses, seismic traces. Some very strange echoes.”

Stef knelt now, beside the emplacement. The panel looked about a couple of centimetres thick. “Is it safe to touch?”

“Be my guest,” Trant said.

Stef set her right hand on the material. She felt nothing. “I wish I didn’t have to wear this damn glove.”

“The material is actually a good deal cooler than the ambient temperature.”

Stef drew her hand back over the edge of the panel, and felt an odd pulling sensation. She tried again, passing her hand back and forth over the edge; it was a kind of tide, a sideways push, like passing a charged iron rod through a magnetic field.

“We don’t know what it’s made of,” Trant said. “Needless to say. We’ve tried cutting it, with low-level lasers; it just soaks up the heat. There are more destructive tests we could try, but we’ve been reluctant to go that far.”

Stef knew there had always been loose talk about the kernels possibly being artefacts of intelligence. They might or might not be. It was hard to dismiss the Hatch as anything other than an artefact—what natural process could produce an object with this regularity? “Do you think it’s in any way associated with the kernels?”

“Well,” King said, “we found it in the same layer as a rich kernel lode—”

Trant said, “It seems coincidental if they aren’t associated. To find two extraordinary things in one location—assuming a link exists is the simplest hypothesis. Occam’s razor, Major Kalinski?”

She ignored the gentle goad. “I don’t suppose you’ve tried opening the Hatch.”

Trant said, “That seam, whatever it is, is too fine for most of our tools. We could try harder… Anyhow, it would be futile.”

“How so?”

“Because the Hatch is just a mask. A plate sitting there on levelled-off rock. There’s nothing underneath it. We’ve proved that with sonic and radar probes, and by drilling into the rock under the Hatch.” She pointed to a couple of small pits.

Stef got to her knees again and examined the Hatch, running her fingers along its thickness. Again she felt that odd sideways push. “Have you measured its volume?”

“I can tell you the calculation.” Trant pulled a slate from a pouch in her suit leg, and fiddled with it. “We’ve got precise measurements of every dimension—”

“No. That’s a calculation. Length by breadth by height. Have you measured the volume?”

Trant seemed baffled. “No. I mean—how?”

Stef stood up. “What have you got in the nature of fluids down here? Water, lubricants…”

It took a couple of hours to set up the experiment. They rigged up a dome over the Hatch that would hold pressure, and pumped it full of non-reactive nitrogen. Then they poured in lubricant, an inert hydrocarbon borrowed from the elevator assembly, that flooded the emplacement.

It was fiddly work in pressure suits and with improvised equipment, but once Stef had communicated what she wanted the engineers worked quickly and effectively, even though some of them grumbled about the risk of wasting the lubricant, a precious resource here on Mercury. It was always the same with engineers, Stef had observed; nothing made them happier than to be given a well-defined and achievable task, and to be left alone to get on with it.

So they measured the volume of the Hatch and its emplacement directly, from the displacement of the lubricant fluid. She had them repeat the measurement a few times for accuracy.

The direct measurement differed from the result obtained by multiplying together length, breadth and height.

“It’s too big,” Trant said, wondering. “Ten per cent or more… Too big for any errors.”

“I don’t understand,” King said, grumbling. “I can’t get my head around this. All this mucking about with engine oil!”

Stef grinned. He seemed disappointed she hadn’t ordered some vast super-physics experiment to be run. “Sir Michael, it’s as if you have a one-litre jug, only it holds two litres.”

“It’s bigger on the inside than the outside?”

“Something like that. There’s some kind of distortion of space-time going on here.” The dome had been cleared away now, the Hatch revealed again, the last of the lubricant fluid removed. Stef knelt and touched the panel surface once more.

Trant was staring past her. “Major—”

Stef passed her hand over the edge. “Just like before, I feel something, like a tidal effect.”

“Major Kalinski, I think—”

“And just as the kernels are evidently some kind of space-time phenomenon, so is the Hatch—”

“Stephanie!” King snapped.

Stef was startled into silence, and turned. Just for a moment King had sounded like Stef’s father, as King had surely intended.

Trant, glaring, was pointing at the Hatch. “Shut up,” she said evenly. “Turn around. And look.”

Stef turned, needles of icy anticipation prickling along her spine.

The Hatch had changed.

That smooth surface, within the circular seam, was smooth no more. A series of indentations had appeared, set evenly around the edge—they came in pairs, twelve pairs, she counted quickly, like the numbers on an antique clock dial. The indentations themselves were complex in shape, with a textured central crater, and five channels running off in a lopsided star shape.

“Hands,” King said. “They’re meant for human hands.”

Stef saw it as soon as he said it. Somehow she’d been blinded by the obvious, by the incongruity of the setting.

“The imprints of human hands,” Trant said slowly. “On an artefact that’s nearly as old as Mercury itself. That’s been here forty thousand times as long as humanity has even existed.”

“More to the point,” King said, “imprints that weren’t there a minute ago. Not before Major Kalinski ran her experiment with the lubricant.”

“And,” Stef said carefully, “before we made our very first deduction about it. Suddenly it knows we are here.”

Trant guffawed. “It knows? Now who’s hypothesising about agencies?”

Stef ignored her. “The purpose seems obvious.” She stepped up to the Hatch, and knelt beside it once more. She held out her hands, and again felt that odd tidal ripple. Had the quality of that sensation changed at all? Her senses didn’t seem subtle enough to be able to tell. She looked back at King and Trant, at the technicians and guards behind them, all in their ISF pressure suits, like so many robots. All of them staring straight back at her. As if daring her.

She turned, spread her gloved fingers, and extended her hands so they were over one of the indentation sets. But she held back from touching the surface. Should she do this? The Hatch had changed, it seemed, the minute she had figured out something about its true nature. It had responded. How would it respond, what would change, if she went one step further now?

Only one way to find out. Oddly she wasn’t afraid any more.

She settled her hands into the indentations. Gloved, they seemed to fit perfectly.

And the Hatch immediately began to open.

Trant grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back, bodily lifting her in the low gravity.

They stood and watched as the huge circular plate lifted out of its seam, attached to the emplacement by some invisible hinge—how was it being held? Stef bent to see. The rising lid just touched the wider emplacement at its rim. There seemed no material attachment.

And again she’d had her eye off the ball; she wasn’t observing the most striking phenomenon. Under the rising Hatch was revealed a chamber, cylindrical, maybe four metres deep, set in the Mercury rock. It seemed to be made of the same greyish substance as the rest of the installation, and it was lit by a sourceless glow.

“That’s impossible,” King said.

“You are right,” said Monica Trant. “There’s nothing but rock under that plate. We measured it.”

But Stef could see the glow coming from the impossible pit reflected in their visors, their staring faces, baffled. She felt a peculiar exhilaration. This wasn’t like her at all. Most of her life, her science, had proceeded in cautious, methodical steps, with each new extension of her knowledge building incrementally on what had gone before. Now all that was thrown out; now she was rushing headlong into the unknown, the non-categorisable, the unidentifiable, in a way she’d never imagined.

This wasn’t Stef Kalinski’s way. She was thrilled. She could barely wait for the next step.

As soon as the Hatch lid had come to a halt, standing vertically from its invisible hinge, Stef walked forward to the edge. “Monica. Give me a hand.”

“You’re going in there?” Trant glanced at King, who shrugged. Trant said, “I don’t know how wise this is.”

“We’ve come this far. It’s obvious what we’re meant to do next. We can’t stop now.” Stef glanced up at the rig of cameras and sensors all around the emplacement. “We’re being recorded, right? Whatever happens, those who follow us will know what became of us.”

“Yes. But this doesn’t seem too scientific, Stef. Just to plunge in.”

“This isn’t science. This is exploration.”

“No,” King gloated. “Let’s be honest. It’s appropriation. It’s conquest. It’s going to kill those gerontocrats in New Beijing, when they read about this day, when the security blankets are lifted in fifty or a hundred years’ time, that we haven’t just got the kernels—now we have this.”

“Whatever. Let’s get on with it.” And she held out her arms.

The ISF goons came forward to help too. They braced Trant while she took Stef’s gloved hands in her own, and lowered her into the pit. Stef made them move slowly, while she tried to be hyperaware of any odd sensations, any more of those tidal effects. She felt nothing untoward. It was just a hole in the ground, impossible or not.

When they had lowered her as far as they could they released her hands. Gentle as a snowflake she settled to the floor. She looked up at the opening above her, the circle of visored faces peering in.

Then she turned around slowly, inspecting the walls. “There’s another hatch,” she said. “Another circular seam. Set in this wall. Smaller than the big one up there, but here it is. And, guess what? It has handprint indentations again.”

King called down, “Major, maybe you’ve gone far enough.”

“You’re kidding,” she said, staring at the hatch, raising her hands. “What would you do, if you were down here?”

“Think about it. Maybe any curious, tool-wielding species would react the same way to this set-up. You’d go in, one step after another.”

“You mean—”

“Maybe it’s a trap.”

“And maybe it isn’t,” Stef said, unmoved.

“We aren’t going to stop her, sir,” Trant said. “Stef. You might get cut off. Keep talking to us. All right?”

“I hear you. Here I go, with a handprint lock once again.” She settled her hands into the indentations at twelve o’clock on the wall before her. “It’s opening…” She had to step back smartly as the curved door swung back, as smoothly as the hatch lid itself. “Again, I can’t see a hinge, nothing material attaching door to wall. There’s another chamber beyond. A second chamber, similar to the first in dimension. More of those grey walls, the sourceless light.” She stepped forward cautiously, towards the doorway rim. “And…”

And, standing in the second chamber, before another doorway seam on the far wall, was a figure: a human, in a pressure suit, apparently ISF issue. A human staring back at her.

“What?” An unfamiliar voice in her ear speaker. “What’s wrong?”

No, not unfamiliar, just—unexpected.

“Stef? Penny?” That was Trant’s voice. “Stef, what have you found down there? Penny, you’re still out of our field of view.”

Penny?

The stranger took another step forward, towards the open hatchway. Stef found herself staring into a familiar face, behind the visor. Too familiar. Found herself staring at a familiar name, too, on the suit’s chest patch.

KALINSKI, PENELOPE D.